Elon Musk repeatedly bills himself as the savior of free speech, which is why Kiev’s latest allegations against the Twitter boss are explosive.
On Tuesday evening, Ukrainian users were unable to log in or register with their mobile number on the short messaging service Twitter. The company has stopped sending two-factor authentication codes, Ukrainian media and numerous users of the platform have reported.
Additionally, several people complained that both Ukrainian profiles and country-related topics weren’t easier to find in Twitter searches and didn’t appear in the app’s history.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak also commented on the incident. The “war in Ukraine” theme has disappeared from Twitter trends, tweets denouncing Russian aggression have been radically curtailed, and users are no longer allowed to register or log in with Ukrainian phone numbers, he denounced. “Elon Musk, I wonder if we will ever see ‘Twitter Files’ on Fall/Winter 2022?” Podoljak said.
The adviser to the Ukrainian president was referring to an announcement Musk made in early December and apparently indirectly accused the Twitter boss of censoring Ukrainian topics. Musk announced in early December that he plans to use so-called “Twitter Files” to show “what really happened to Twitter’s suppressed Hunter Biden story.” He involved several screenshots released with emails from then-Twitter bosses and politicians debating whether Twitter had made the right decision in hosting a story for the New York Post tabloid in 2020. Read more here.
The fact that topics about Ukraine are now apparently no longer easy to find on Twitter is also explosive because Elon Musk has repeatedly presented himself as the savior of freedom of expression on the social network in the past. Among other things, Musk justified the activation of profiles that had previously been blocked for violations.
