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SpaceX founder and newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed that the risk of his assassination is “quite significant”.
The claim came during a two-hour chat on Twitter Spaces over the weekend, during which the world’s richest man said he definitely wouldn’t “do any outdoor car parades, let me put it that way.”
“Frankly, the risk of something bad happening to me, or even literally being shot at, is quite significant,” he added.
“It’s not that hard to kill someone if you wanted to, so I hope they don’t, and fate smiles at the situation with me and it doesn’t happen… There’s definitely some risk there.”
Musk has signaled that his takeover of Twitter will usher in a new era for the social media platform, during which political voices will not be silenced and free speech will be the top priority.
Musk recently revealed that he gave two journalists unrestricted access to Twitter’s entire treasure trove of internal corporate communications that will allow the public to better understand how the company operated during its most controversial moments.
In journalist Matt Taibbi’s first Twitter Files release, readers get an insight into how Twitter’s content moderation leadership arrived at the confusing decision to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Musk’s comments came after Friday night’s inaugural installment of what has been dubbed the Twitter Files: an unfettered inside look at corporate communications on Twitter over the past few years, including during some of the most controversial moments in Twitter. the company.
Musk gave journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss full access to the sensitive topic, which he said ultimately “might make sense to have it… publicly available for anyone to see.”
But for now, it’s up to the chosen news professionals to analyze and publish the chosen parts of the hidden treasure.
Kicking things off on Friday night, Taibbi posted a thread that provided insight into the suppression of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story that was first published by the New York Post in October 2020, just before the last presidential election.
“What you are about to read is the first installment in a series, based on thousands of internal documents obtained by sources on Twitter,” Taibbi wrote. ‘The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story’.
The emails contained back and forth between various members of Twitter’s content moderation team that ultimately led to the shaky decision to ban the story without consulting co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
“Twitter went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,'” Taibbi wrote. “They even blocked their transmission by direct message, a tool until now reserved for extreme cases, for example, child pornography.”
Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, where most of the company’s employees have been laid off or laid off since Musk’s recent acquisition.
The world’s richest man said during a Twitter Spaces chat over the weekend that he believes the risk to his life is not negligible and that he plans to avoid exposing himself unnecessarily to potential crowd dangers.
He then detailed various reactions from the Washington, D.C., political class, including Trump campaign staffers and members of Congress.
“[Where] Our word is not repressed and we can say what we want to say without fear of reprisals”, he declared.
Musk said the idea of the Twitter Files exercise is “to shed light on everything that happened in the past to build public trust for the future.”
‘I’m not controlling the narrative. It’s obvious that there’s been a lot of information control, information suppression, including things that affected the election, and everything has to be… you just want to have the stuff out there,’ she said.
Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has said that “as long as you’re not causing harm to another person, you should be able to say whatever you want.”
Until now, that philosophy has been governing his approach to running Twitter, where nearly all previously banned accounts have returned to the platform.
Although he claimed to have read almost none of the information he has now passed on to Taibbi and Weiss, he has been left uneasy by the company’s past role in working closely with members of the Biden administration during and before the current president took office. position.
“Frankly, Twitter was acting as an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was absurd,” Musk said.
“If Twitter is carrying out team orders before an election and silencing dissenting voices in a critical election, that’s the definition of election interference.”