Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on
October 27, just days before Brazil's presidential second-round runoff vote,
when far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro was defeated by leftist Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva.
"I've seen a lot of concerning tweets
about the recent Brazil election," Musk wrote on Twitter when asked by a
user about elections possibly "handled" by the company's previous
management.
"If those tweets are accurate, it's
possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left wing candidates,"
added the billionaire.
Bolsonaro earlier this year hosted Musk at
a meeting in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, when he called the US
billionaire's takeover of Twitter a "breath of hope" and dubbed him a
"legend of liberty".
Both Lula and Bolsonaro widely used Twitter
during their campaigns. Some Bolsonaro allies - including the most-voted
candidate for the lower house of Congress, Nikolas Ferreira - had their
accounts suspended by court orders after the second round for questioning the
election results.
Last month, Twitter's former head of trust
and safety Yoel Roth said the social media company was not safer under new
owner Elon Musk, warning in his first interview since resigning this month that
the company no longer had enough staff for safety work.
Roth had previously tweeted after Musk's
takeover that by some measures, Twitter safety had improved under the
billionaire's ownership. Asked in an interview at the Knight Foundation
conference in November whether he still felt that way, Roth said:
"No."
Roth was a Twitter veteran who helped steer
the social media platform through several watershed decisions, including the
move to permanently suspend its most famous user, former US President Donald
Trump, last year.
His departure further rattled advertisers,
many of whom backed away from Twitter after Musk laid off half of the staff,
including many involved with content moderation.
Before Musk assumed the helm at Twitter,
about 2,200 people globally were focused on content moderation work, said Roth.
He said he did not know the number after the acquisition because the corporate
directory had been turned off. © Reuters
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