If this truly is an attempt at censorship, it seems that shadow banning could have been just as effective and harder to detect. Maybe they could even secretly add a generic has_negative_sentiment_towards_an_elon_company modifier to their ranking algorithm and dial the outreach of such tweets way way down, in similar vein to author_is_elon.

Indeed, but Elon's Twitter is a case study in low effort trolling.

For example, Twitter manually override the blue check system to make it look like critics had purchased it. Then someone realized changing their name would clear the checkmark. After dozens of iterations of Dril changing his name and having the checkmark manually re-added someone at Twitter thought to disable changing his name.

At every step of the way they used the shittiest possible solution. I'm unsurprised the pattern continues.

There's no reason to think Musk doesn't doomscroll Twitter looking for negative stuff about him to nuke. There doesn't have to be a galaxy brain plan here.

A person seemingly working for Twitter commented that the person making this claim deleted the tweet himself together with a bunch of other tweets. If he didn't, he should check authorized devices because that's what their data shows.

Considering the statement from Twitter and the fact that the user offers nothing other than a screenshot of the tweet before deletion, I would be hesitant on taking his word for it.

Are you referring to the tweet by @arodericks? Amusingly his account has no sign of offical-ness, but I did find confirmation he really work(ed) for Twitter on newsmax [1].

A few days ago I would have agreed with you that it's unlikely a Twitter official just blatantly lied about something so obvious. But then they made the UI falsely indicate people had verified their phone numbers for a juvenile prank.

Now I don't trust Twitter more than a random user. So I have no idea what happened.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/twitter-files-taibbi-state...

>because that's what their data shows

How do you know?

I'm reciting Twitter, not making any claims.

This is precisely why some Twitterati have named him "Space Karen".