An undercover operation by US-based far-right activist group Project Veritas has published a secretly recorded conversation with a Twitter engineer who claimed the micro-blogging platform has “left-wing bias” and “does not believe in free speech”, the media reported on Tuesday.
Siru Murugesan, a senior engineer, is heard admitting to a female Project Veritas journalist in the video that the social media company routinely censors posts by conservatives, according to Daily Mail.
Twitter was yet to react to the undercover operation.
Murugesan was recorded saying Twitter’s culture is extremely far left where workers “hate, hate, hate” Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover.
His comments come as Tesla CEO Musk opened a Twitter war against CEO Parag Agrawal over the actual number of bots or fake accounts on the platform. On Tuesday, he clearly started that the “deal will not move forward” unless Agrawal reveals the exact number.
Musk has vowed for “free speech” as well as to “defeat the spam bots” and “authenticate all humans”.
Murugesan said that staff at Twitter ‘hate’ Musk’s takeover, and described them as “super left, left, left, left, left”.
“Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people. Twitter does not believe in this value as a platform. Because it’s not conducive to a business,” he said in the video.
“Ideologically, it does not make sense, because we’re actually censoring the right and not the left… It’s true, there is bias. It is what it is today,” Murugesan added.
According to him, the Twitter staff fear the Tesla CEO will make the company far more “capitalist” instead of the “socialist” environment it currently is.
“I think it’s just like the environment, like you’re there and you become like this commie,” he said.
“So, everyone on the right wing will be like, ‘bro, it’s okay to stay, just gotta tolerate it.’ ‘The left will be like, no, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform,” he added.
(The story has been published via a syndicated feed.)
