© The Babylon BeeElon Musk
During a recent interview, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, unveiled that Twitter's engineers stumbled upon an old line of code, over ten years old, programmed to suppress tweets containing specific keywords.
This revelation was made public during Musk's conversation with The Babylon Bee, which was published on Twitter this Wednesday. Notably, Twitter's prior censorship of The Babylon Bee was a significant factor that led Musk to consider acquiring the social media giant.
In the interview, Kyle Mann, the editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee, brought up Musk's unusual decision to disclose the 'Twitter files' after taking over the company. He questioned why anyone would want to highlight the problematic elements within the company they have just taken charge of.
"One of the craziest things you did when you took over Twitter was start releasing the Twitter files," Mann said. "Who takes over a company and then says, 'Look, how horrible all this stuff is that's going on'?"
Musk replied that without admitting to the past wrongdoings, it would be unreasonable to expect people to trust the company in the future.
"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 replied. "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."
Adding to this, Musk stated that the aim is to uncover any hidden layers or obscured elements within Twitter. He pointed out a recent discovery of a censorship mechanism coded into the platform back in 2012.
While Musk admitted that the term 'censorship' might not be the most accurate description for the code, he confirmed that Twitter indeed had a list of words which, if included in a tweet, would trigger suppression of that tweet. For instance, a tweet containing the word 'suck' would not get amplified on the platform.
Describing it as a 'relic of code' from 2012, Musk revealed that this mechanism was still in place as of last week. He also confirmed that the line of code was universally applicable across all tweets. Approximately a thousand words were included in this list, and their presence in any tweet would lead to suppression of that tweet on the platform.
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Odds are if the list is published those words are going to be used way more by way more folks who are indignant.
Is "indignant" one of the words on the list - if so that explains a lot.
Based on a check I just did not I don't think the list has been published.
If you going to "chat" about then publish it.