Sean Hannity on Wednesday suggested that sharp increases in the number of followers for certain conservatives’ Twitter accounts is due to staff at the social media company attempting to “cover their tracks” before Elon Musk closes on his $44 billion buyout of the social media company.
While Twitter has said these changes are largely organic in nature, Hannity saw some Big Tech conspiracy at work.
“Conservatives on the platform—all of a sudden out of nowhere—enjoyed a massive bump in followers and interactions,” a sarcastic-sounding Hannity said.
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“For example, in just two days, Donald Trump Jr.—wow, magically—he got 200,000 new followers. That is roughly a 2,000 percent increase daily. Wow. It’s almost as if Twitter employees lifted a broad anti-conservative, anti-Trump shadow ban—which we all knew was taking place anyway—in an effort to cover their tracks before the new boss takes over.”
In 2018, after Hannity griped about Twitter supposedly lessening the influence of conservative accounts, then-CEO Jack Dorsey called into his radio show and said, “We do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content. Period.”
The Fox host referenced Dorsey’s comment while continuing his rant.
“Now Twitter claims there is nothing nefarious at play here, but they’ve said that all before. We know the current executives at Twitter are far-left political hacks. We have witnessed their dishonest and deeply biased gatekeeping over and over and over again, but hopefully that’s going to change,” Hannity said, echoing colleague Tucker Carlson, who trumpeted Musk’s purchase as a development as politically significant as the 2016 presidential election.
Hannity added that he hoped that “stories about the Biden family’s very real corruption might even be allowed to trend at some times”—a reference to how Twitter in October 2020 limited sharing options on a New York Post story that contained then-unconfirmed details about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter had also prohibited the publication from accessing its account for about two weeks.
On Tuesday, Musk weighed in on that matter, writing in a tweet: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
