Even before he finalized his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had been hinting that he might hang some of the platform’s dirty laundry out for public viewing if he took over. This had a lot of liberals understandably nervous, but back then it was all still hypothetical. More recently, Musk used his own Twitter account to declare that the public had a right to know what had been going on in the background and said he would be releasing some “transparency reports” on the platform in order to regain the trust of the public. That process has now begun. The first report, as published by our colleague Julio Rosas at Townhall, wasn’t completely earth-shattering, but it did offer some intriguing tidbits.

Twitter has published its first set of transparency reports about how the site had operated prior to multi-billionaire Elon Musk taking over the company. Among the reports, the social media giant states they are no longer enforcing its COVID-19 “misleading information policy.”

Musk had promised the release of the transparency reports, saying it is necessary to regain the trust of the public.

Since January 2020, over 11 million accounts were challenged for violating the COVID-19 information policy, 11,230 accounts were suspended, and 97,674 pieces of content were removed.

One piece of internal communications dealt with the deployment of the COVID vaccines throughout 2021. In it, the company described how it would “prioritize removing or annotating potentially harmful and misleading information to ensure that users can readily find credible information.”

As you can see from the numbers above, that process of “removing or annotating” moved forward at a colossal pace. Threats and warnings were issued to tens of millions of accounts. Thousands were suspended and countless tweets were deleted. Many of the “offenders” said things that questioned whether or not the vaccines were safe or if they were actually able to prevent people from catching or spreading the disease. Of course, we now know that the vaccines do have serious side effects that were rarely discussed, and vaccinated people can indeed catch and spread the virus.

That first release still didn’t have the meat and potatoes that I’m waiting for, however. I would like to see any internal communications that Twitter had with the Biden administration. We know such collaboration in censoring people took place with Facebook. It seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have been doing the same thing with Twitter’s former management team. And if they did, that’s a violation of the First Amendment and people will need to be held accountable.

Meanwhile, you probably saw how Musk claimed that Apple was threatening him if he decided to spill the beans. He claims they threatened to drop Twitter from the app store, among other things. At CNBC, one analyst suggested that Elon may be “luring” Apple into a fight with congressional Republicans that could turn out poorly for Blackrock, Tim Cook, and others.

Here’s one way it could go:

Musk makes a change to Twitter in order to to bypass Apple’s 30% fees, such as allowing users to plug in their credit cards into the app to subscribe to Twitter Blue or other new features.

Apple pulls the app because of these violations.

Musk frames the dispute with Apple as an issue over free speech and content moderation, and Republican politicians agree.

Apple gets caught up in a nationwide debate over free speech and monopoly power focusing on its App Store.

I’m quite confident that Apple’s management would far prefer to stay quietly in the background, censoring or deplatforming anyone with opinions that run contrary to The Narrative. The one thing they don’t want to do is wind up squarely in the middle of a nasty and very public fight that could turn half of their user base against them. That’s the sort of thing that causes stock prices to tank. Will it happen? We shall see. But I’d be willing to bet that Elon Musk would have a big smile on his face if it did.