Senator calls on Elon Musk to publicly investigate Twitter

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote a letter Tuesday to billionaire Elon Musk in which he asked the new Twitter owner to conduct a public audit of the platform’s censorship practices. 

Hawley tweeted a copy of the letter, asking him to “make it all public.”

“Twitter has largely evaded public accountability over the past several years,” Hawley began. “Since I’ve been in the Senate, I’ve sent a number of oversight inquiries to the company. These letters cover subjects as diverse as content moderation policies, viewpoint discrimination, suppression of content, and Twitter’s own security. Twitter, not surprisingly, has effectively ignored these requests.” 

“But perhaps most importantly, all the way in 2019 I sent a letter to Twitter urging the company to ‘conduct a third-party audit and release the results to the public, in full.’ 

Among the items Hawley requested be investigated is shadowbanning, an unofficial practice in which a user's reach is quietly suppressed by the platform, ensuring that their posts don’t reach a larger audience. 

He also requested an investigation into the suppression of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden. When the story broke just before the 2020 presidential election, Twitter immediately banned the story and suspended the New York Post for several weeks.  

“Now you have the chance to make that kind of audit a reality,” Hawley continued. “In recent years, Twitter has intervened in American discourse with an increasingly heavy hand, attempting to shape the information environment for overtly partisan reasons. Algorithms didn’t make those calls; employees did. And at this point, the American people deserve to know the truth about what went on at Twitter for years behind closed doors. 

The senator then asked Musk to find the answers to the following questions: 

• Who was responsible for deliberately suppressing the New York Post’s now-vindicated reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and business dealings? 
• How many Twitter users have had their accounts suspended, and why? 
• How many Twitter users have been shadowbanned, and why? 
• Do Twitter’s shadowbanning and suspension patterns evince a consistent political bias? 
• Have Twitter employees, since news of your acquisition of the platform became public, made changes to the platform or deleted records of their time at the service? 

“A public audit like this will prove essential,” Hawley said, “as you start to rebuild a culture of free speech and open discourse at Twitter, to determining where exactly things went wrong on the platform and who is principally responsible.” 

“No doubt the results will be illuminating to all of us.”