Twitter Files Released
A weekend media storm and its background explained
While you were enjoying your weekend, many people were glued to their screens to digest the latest revelations coming out of Twitter. Late on Friday journalist Matt Taibbi shared the exclusive goods on what happened inside Twitter when it suppressed the ‘Hunter Biden Laptop’ story. Given exclusive access by Elon Musk on the condition the story would be released on Twitter itself, he opened the floodgates with a tweetstorm that basically gives you the entire saga. Read at your leisure.
The ensuing media fracas had multiple dimensions. Many journalists and commentators could not restrain themselves and tried to take down Taibbi for selling his soul to Musk’s agenda. Endless references to working for ‘the world’s richest man’ gives you an idea of the overall quality of these comments. There is some jealousy here, it may also be that many have come to buy into Musk as an evil right-wing force with Taibbi facilitating this agenda. That is an equally non-sensical assertion. There is however some truth to the criticism that most of what was released was already known. The newsworthy pieces and the interesting bits however were in how Twitter during its pre-takeover days operated.
The story was not about Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine or some of his sexual escapades, but how Twitter had actively managed to prevent the story as reported by the New York Post being shared on its site. The Republicans believed releasing it would swing the 2020 election in their direction by putting the Biden family and its extracurricular activities in broad daylight. This was a stretch - who cares what Hunter does - but when campaigns go to the wire in the final stages anything will do, from long forgotten DUI charges to certain videotapes. They generally tend not to have their desired effect.
Twitter at the time received many requests to suppress or delete stories from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign, some were honoured, some were not. With various arguments Twitter management could make decisions to moderate content. The Twitter files as released on Friday however reveal how the site’s management leaned mostly Democratic and effectively censored the laptop story. What is worse is that the decision-making process around it was biased, convoluted, sometimes random and often did not even involve CEO Jack Dorsey. Most of these decisions were made by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal affairs. The weakness of the arguments to censor the article would become a serious issue as even Democrats realized. Congressman Ro Khanna directly warned Gadde about how it could spin out of control and become a debate about free speech and censorship and not about what actually was found on the laptop of the future president’s son. And Khanna was right, it is exactly what happened.
So there you have it in a nutshell. Twitter’s senior management approach to content moderation was skewed to the Democrats. And it wasn’t just the NY Post story about Biden Jr., many Twitter users over the years were locked out of their accounts or shadow-banned for either very trivial reasons or in some cases highly questionable interpretations of their behaviour on the platform. It was random, indiscriminate and highly partisan. This is why the new Twitter under Musk has set out to reinstate many of these accounts while opening the books on how Twitter was previously operated. The picture it reveals confirms what many had been saying for a long time.
It is for many very hard to look at this in a non-political way and evaluate the matter purely on the merits of ‘free speech’ and how far it can go. No one disputes the need to moderate content and keep the most degraded views and links to gruesome content off the site. That does not include newsworthy items or controversial opinions and certainly not articles from mainstream media.
Free speech is not endless. But the standards applied by the old Twitter were questionable, divisive and often unfair. If Musk succeeds in widening the standard, keeping the worst infractions at bay while improving the overall quality of the platform his $44 billion may be well spent. The discussion if the wealthiest man on earth should get to decide all of this is quite another matter. One step at a time.
Twitter is a private company and can censor as it pleases. It's the same thing Fox and Alt-right sources do.