Josh Hawley calls on Elon Musk to reveal number of Twitter accounts banned, suppressed, or throttled

In a letter addressed to new Twitter owner Elon Musk, Senator Josh Hawley called on the billionaire to "open the books" on who Twitter has banned, suspended, or throttled, and to reveal who was responsible for censoring the New York Post’s initial Hunter Biden laptop reporting.

The Tuesday letter opens up by congratulating Musk on his purchase.

"Congratulations on your acquisition of Twitter. Your commitment to free speech is rare in the world of social media, and I am hopeful you will indeed help Twitter become a platform that values and protects it," Hawley wrote.

He suggested that "there’s certainly a lot of work to be done," saying that "Twitter has largely evaded public accountability over the past several years."

Hawley said that he has sent numerous inquiry letters to the company regarding things like moderation policies and suppression of content, though "Twitter, not surprisingly, has effectively ignored these requests."

Noting a 2019 letter he sent to Twitter urging a third-party audit that never came to fruition, Hawley said, "now you have the chance to make that kind of audit a reality."

"In recent years, Twitter has intervened in American discourse with an increasingly heavy hand, attempting to shape the information environment for overtly partisan reasons," Hawley wrote. "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."

Listing off some "particularly salient questions" that should be investigated in this audit, Hawley requested to know who was responsible for "deliberately suppressing" the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, how many Twitter users have been suspended and shadow banned and why, if these suspensions and shadow bans "evince a consistent political bias," and whether Twitter employees have since Musk's buyout "made changes to the platform or deleted records of their time at the service."

"A public audit like this will prove essential, 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," Hawley concluded. "No doubt the results will be illuminating for all of us."