Twitter CEO Elon Musk suggested on Saturday morning that Twitter possibly interfered in Brazil’s recent contentious presidential election.
“I have seen many worrying tweets about the recent elections in Brazil,” musk wrote on the platform he took control of in October, just days before the election. “If those tweets are accurate, Twitter staff may have given preference to left-wing candidates.”
The post suggests that Twitter employees may have been involved in influencing recent elections that were declared by Brazil’s Supreme Court a narrow victory for socialist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva over right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula won the election with 50.9% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%, in a result that sparked mass protests across the country by Bolsonaro’s supporters who denounced widespread fraud.
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SpaceX founder Elon Musk during a joint T-Mobile and SpaceX event on August 25, 2022 in Boca Chica Beach, Texas.
(Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)
At the end of November, after previously acknowledging defeat, Bolsonaro affirmed that an audit by his coalition showed signs of “malfunctions” that his team believes affected some 280,000 voting machines.
The result would go to 51.05% for Bolsonaro and 48.95% for Lula if the affected votes were invalidated.
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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro arrives for a press conference two days after being defeated by Lula da Silva in the presidential runoff at the Alvorada Palace on November 1, 2022.
(Andressa Anholete/Getty Images)
Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of Lula’s party, called Bolsonaro’s complaint little more than a “trick.”
“No more procrastination, irresponsibility, insults to institutions and democracy,” he wrote on Twitter. “The election was decided by vote and Brazil needs peace to build a better future.”
Bolsonaro earlier this year hosted Musk at a meeting in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, when he called the American billionaire’s takeover of Twitter a “breath of hope” and dubbed him a “legend of freedom.”
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Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is running for re-election, smiles before a presidential debate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, October 28, 2022.
(AP Photo/Bruna Brado)
Both Lula and Bolsonaro used Twitter extensively 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 runoff for questioning the election results.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
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Musk’s comment on Brazil comes days after his acknowledgment that before his inauguration, the “obvious reality” was that Twitter “has interfered in elections” through its content moderation policies.
On Friday, Musk posted internal Twitter documents showing how Twitter employees withheld details about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Peter Aitken of Fox News and Reuters contributed to this report.
