Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed that his continuing search of the social media platform’s source code still finds objectionable material.
The Tesla founder remarked during an interview with The Babylon Bee that code added in 2012 suppressed tweets that used certain words. For example, he said adding “suck” would prevent a tweet from being amplified.
Musk added there were approximately 1,000 words that would trigger a tweet’s suppresion based on the code inserted a decade ago.
The Daily Wire further reported:
Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed during an interview this week that engineers at the social media company recently discovered a line of code more than decade old that would suppress tweets if they contained specific words.
Musk made the remarks during an interview with The Babylon Bee published on Twitter on Wednesday. Twitter’s previous censorship of The Babylon Bee was one of the company’s actions that sparked Musk’s interest in buying Twitter.
“One of the craziest things you did when you took over Twitter was start releasing the Twitter files,” Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee, said to Musk. “Who takes over a company and then says, ‘Look, how horrible all this stuff is that’s going on’?”
“If we’re not going to expose the things that were done wrong, why should people believe us in the future? That’s why we’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Musk responded. “Don’t take my word for it – literally look at the algorithm, you should be able to recreate the results that you see on Twitter using that algorithm.”
“So we’re trying to make sure that everything is brought to light, not just so there’s no hidden layers or anything,” Musk added. “We just discovered last week some hidden layer of censorship that was written in 2012.”
Musk said that while “‘censorship’ is probably the wrong word” to describe the code, Twitter had a list of words it would use to evaluate Tweets.
“If you put ‘suck’ in a tweet, then it does not get amplified on the platform,” he explained. “And that was literally code from like 2012. We found this relic of code last week.”
Musk confirmed the single line of code was being applied to all tweets, noting that there were about a thousand words on the list that, if used in a tweet, would suppress that tweet.
WATCH:
@elonmusk reveals he’s still uncovering hidden censorship layers in Twitter’s code. pic.twitter.com/b4B1oBiSZU
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2023
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