Comedian Bill Maher is all for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, saying the company needs a “new sheriff” after it failed to follow the First Amendment — specifically when it kicked the New York Post off the platform following the paper’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop report in 2020.
“The argument to me is, has Twitter failed in setting themself up in the past as the judge of what can go out there? And I would say yes, you have,” the comic said Friday on HBO’s “Real Time.”
“You failed when you threw the New York Post off of Twitter for talking about Hunter Biden’s emails. And it turned out that was a real story. You failed when you said we couldn’t read about whether COVID had come from a lab. You failed!”
Joined by MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and former Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), Maher railed against censorship on Twitter — which was recently purchased by Musk in a major $44 million takeover with his purported goal to privatize the company and restore free speech.
After The Post report was published in October 2020, Twitter locked the paper out of its account for more than two weeks over baseless charges that the exposé used hacked information.
Twitter also blocked users from sharing the link to The Post article indicating that Hunter Biden introduced President Joe Biden to the Ukrainian businessman, calling the link “potentially harmful.”
Facebook also said it would limit the spread of The Post’s story on its own platform.
In November 2020, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Twitter made a “mistake” by barring users from sharing The Post’s revelatory report about Hunter Biden’s emails.
“We recognize it as a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately,” Dorsey said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which he and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were grilled by lawmakers over their companies’ influence and perceived anti-conservative bias.
During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on misinformation and social media in March 2021, Dorsey said The Post blackout was a “process error.”
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey told congress.
Just last month, The Washington Post and New York Times both confirmed the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop after reviewing “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop,” that were authenticated by people involved in the investigation in Biden’s business dealings, The Times wrote.
