In an interview with The Babylon Bee, entrepreneur Elon Musk disclosed his ongoing exploration of Twitter’s source code, which continues to uncover objectionable content.
According to Musk, he discovered that code implemented in 2012 was designed to suppress tweets containing specific words. For instance, he mentioned that including the word “suck” would prevent a tweet from gaining amplification.
Musk also revealed that approximately 1,000 words were identified as triggers for tweet suppression based on the code that was inserted ten years ago.
Furthermore, The Daily Wire provided additional coverage on this matter:
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.
