It could be, sure. But people are playing influence games with Elon, too.

By all the people with more money...

He seems to hang out in the comments with lots of Nazi and ultra right-wing wackos. These seem to have an influence on him.

Has he removed that direct line?

He is the direct line now, that's what he paid 44billion for.

Say what you want about his handling of Kanye, at the very least it was transparent as fuck. He practically livetweeted his whims

Some says he removed Kayne because Kayne posted Elon's unflattering pic in his last tweet.

Given Elon Musk handling of other tweets, I doubt he was being transparent. That swastika post just gave him an excuse to remove Kayne.

This is a common delusion from people who want to believe it. Those pictures are all over my timeline all the time, he's doing a bad job banning people who post them.

There was nothing transparent about it, he said he suspended Ye's account for promoting violence which was a lie.

That's because Kanye is a celebrity and Musk knows him.

In the daily business there is much less transparency.

Just look at the accounts that got suspended since Musk's takeover.

Which accounts?

I saw an article about a bunch of antifa accounts, but they were posting how to disrupt protests with violence which seems like a pretty clear violation.

It'd be great if Elon published all removal requests coming in from political operatives, public figures and PR firms. Commandeer one of the myriad bot accounts and turn it into an automated take-down-request publishing-bot.

Why should anybody trust that the feed was complete and that favored individuals or organizations weren't filtered out?

Well, people will probably maintain the same level of belief that they have now. Given the timing, are these leaks arranged to make Musk look one way, or Twitter look another?