Former Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann has asked new Twitter owner Elon Musk whether he has any “hidden files” related to death threats the then-teen received on the social media platform and how Twitter allowed such threats against him to be posted.
Sandmann, 20, took to Twitter on Sunday to ask Musk about the files shortly after the billionaire businessman revealed a string of internal Twitter communications dubbed the “Twitter Files.”
“As I’m watching this all play out, I’m wondering if @elonmusk has any hidden Twitter files relating to what went on here,” Sandmann wrote. “Let’s be clear: under the watch of @vijaya they allowed these illegal threats when I was 16 years old.”
Vijaya refers to Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde.
Alongside the post, Sandmann shared a string of threats made against him on the platform from numerous verified accounts when he was just a teenager.
They included users calling for Sandmann and his fellow classmates to be locked in Covington Catholic High School and for the school to be burned down, for youngsters who wear MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats to be thrown into a wood chipper, and for general calls of violence towards such individuals.
Sandmann was a 16-year-old student at the high school when he was filmed wearing a MAGA hat and smiling as he stood opposite 64-year-old Nathan Phillips, a Native American who was banging a drum while participating in an Indigenous Peoples March.
Musk Unveils Twitter Files
At the time, the video footage went viral and multiple media outlets falsely reported that the teenager had harassed Philips and “stood in his way,” while portraying the events as a group of white teenagers harassing an older Native American.
However, further video footage emerged later showing that Sandmann had been confronted and harassed by other people at the event and that it was Phillips who approached Sandmann and beat a drum while the young Sandmann responded in a calm manner by standing still and smiling.
The teenager later sued a string of outlets including ABC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others, for defamation.
In his post to Musk on Sunday, Sandmann noted that Twitter had allowed the verified accounts that had made death threats against him and his classmates to remain on the platform but had banned others “for nothing.”
“This is not only against their rules, it’s also illegal,” he noted. “Why is this ok?”
Musk is yet to respond publicly to the tweet.
On Friday, the Tesla CEO, through independent journalist Matt Taibbi, revealed how Twitter staff had worked to suppress a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Taibbi shared a string of internal Twitter communications showing how employees at the company had worked to justify censoring the story under the site’s “hacked materials” policy, noting that the decision to do so was “made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.”
The Epoch Times has not been able to independently verify the content of the communications published by Taibbi.
From The Epoch Times
