Big surprise: The Twitter Files \u2014 the reports based on internal Twitter documents and messages that the company\u2019s new owner Elon Musk provided to journalists \u2014 have landed as a polarizing salvo in the culture war.<\/p>\n
Many inclined to distrust what they see as Big Tech\u2019s liberal leanings have cried vindication. The documents show in detail how Twitter made key content moderation decisions that disadvantaged Trump, conservatives, and people who broke with the public health consensus on Covid-19. They say the evidence proves that, again and again, Twitter intervened to squelch speech that the liberal establishment didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, others \u2014 including most liberals and many mainstream journalists \u2014 are unimpressed. They say Twitter\u2019s policies here were already known and that the specific decisions in question \u2014 blocking a story they feared stemmed from a foreign hack, banning the account of President Trump after he incited an insurrection, and deboosting accounts spreading public health misinformation \u2014 generally seem at least defensible.<\/p>\n
So liberals have been inclined to view anything they say with deep skepticism, an instinct that was seemingly vindicated quickly after Taibbi posted his first report. He spotlighted an email<\/a> stating that in October 2020 the Biden campaign had sent along requests to delete certain tweets, writing that an executive responded: \u201cHandled.\u201d Musk responded to<\/a> this revelation with outrage: \u201cIf this isn\u2019t a violation of the Constitution\u2019s First Amendment, what is?\u201d But internet archive sleuths soon established the deleted tweets were pornographic or nude images of Hunter Biden that violated Twitter\u2019s ban on nonconsensually posted sexual material, something Taibbi seemingly had not known. \u201cNo, you do not have a Constitutional right to post Hunter Biden\u2019s dick pic on Twitter,\u201d the Bulwark\u2019s Tim Miller wrote. Additionally, some fear that the documents are being selectively pruned to tell a preferred story that could lack context.<\/p>\n Still, it is worth evaluating the documents on their own merits to the extent we can, without a too-hasty dismissal of all Taibbi and Weiss\u2019s arguments or a defense of Twitter\u2019s old management regime. That regime is gone now, but while they were in place, Twitter was a powerful institution that had a major impact on politics, and its decisions deserve scrutiny \u2014 just as decisions made by Twitter\u2019s new regime, or monarch, deserve scrutiny. Some of the previous management\u2019s decisions, it seems to me, were wrong, and indeed arguably driven by liberal groupthink. Others I\u2019m less certain about, but they\u2019re at least worth discussing. So here are the main decisions being second-guessed.<\/p>\n The first part of the Twitter Files<\/a>, from Taibbi, focuses on Twitter\u2019s October 2020 decision to outright ban links to the first New York Post story about Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop. The ban lasted a little over one day before Twitter lifted it, but the recriminations have continued ever since.<\/p>\n Twitter\u2019s justification was that the story violated its policy against posting \u201chacked materials.\u201d However, the Post said the materials came from a laptop abandoned at a computer repair store, not a hack. There was widespread skepticism of this claim at the time, but there was no evidence for the hack supposition, and none has since emerged. So what was Twitter thinking?<\/p>\n One clue is in a message<\/a> by Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who alludes to \u201cthe SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016.\u201d In 2016, there was an effort by the Russian government to interfere with the general election in a way that would hurt Hillary Clinton and Democrats\u2019 prospects. As later documented in the Mueller report, this effort involved both a \u201ctroll farm\u201d of Russian accounts masquerading as Americans to spread false or inflammatory information, and the \u201chack-and-leak\u201d campaign in which leading Democrats\u2019 emails were stolen and provided to WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n After Trump won, many leading figures in politics, tech, media, and law enforcement concluded that major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook should have done more to stop this Russian interference effort and the spread of \u201cmisinformation\u201d more generally (with some arguing that this was a problem regardless of electoral impact, and others claiming that this helped or even caused Trump\u2019s victory). Law enforcement officials argued the Russian campaign was illegal and indicted about two dozen Russians believed to be involved in it. Social media companies began to take a more aggressive approach to curbing what they saw as misinformation, and as the 2020 election approached, they met regularly with FBI and other government officials to discuss the dangers of potential new foreign interference campaigns.<\/p>\n But several issues are being conflated here. Misinformation is (in theory) false information. Foreign propaganda is not necessarily false, but it is being spread by a foreign government with malicious intent (for example, to inflame America\u2019s divisions). Hacked material, though, is tricker in part because it often isn\u2019t misinformation \u2014 its power comes from its accuracy. Now, it is theoretically possible that false information could be mixed in with true information as part of a hacked document dump, so it\u2019s important to authenticate it to the extent possible. And even authentic information can often be ripped out of context to appear more damning than it really is. Still, Twitter was putting itself in the awkward position where it would be resolving to suppress information that could well be accurate, for the greater good of preventing foreign interference in an election.<\/p>\n More broadly, a blanket ban on hacked material doesn\u2019t seem particularly well thought through, since a fair amount of journalism is based on material that is illicitly obtained in some way (such as the Pentagon Papers). Every major media source wrote about the DNC and Podesta email leaks, as well as the leaked State Department cables, while entertainment journalists wrote about the Sony hack. Should all those stories be banned like the Post\u2019s was? A standard that Twitter won\u2019t host any sexual images of someone posted without their consent, or any personal information like someone\u2019s address, is a neutral one. Beyond that, determining what stolen or hacked information is newsworthy is inherently subjective. Should that judgment be left to social media companies?<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the problem that Twitter jumped to the conclusion that this was a hack in the first place. I can see why they did \u2014 recent high-profile examples of mass personal info dumps like this were generally hacks. So if you had been anticipating a chance to \u201cdo over\u201d 2016\u2019s hack scandal, here it seemed to be. But it was jumping to a conclusion. Additionally, the apparent belief of some employees that proactively censoring the story until there was more information about whether it was hacked info was a way to express \u201ccaution<\/a>\u201d seems dubious \u2014 fully banning a link to a media outlet from the platform was a sweeping measure.<\/p>\n So to me this seems a pretty clear case of overreach by Twitter. This wasn\u2019t a \u201crigging\u201d of the election (again, the ban was only in place for a little over a day). But the decision \u2014 born out of a blinkered focus on avoiding a repeat of 2016, rather than taking speech or press freedom or the different details of this situation into account \u2014 was the wrong call, in my view.<\/p>\n Parts 3<\/a>, 4<\/a>, and 5<\/a> of the Twitter Files all focus on the company\u2019s decision to ban President Trump\u2019s account in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack. They show that as pressure for the company to act against Trump rose from both outside voices<\/a> and their own employees<\/a>, Twitter leaders applied various standards in determining Trump\u2019s account shouldn\u2019t yet be banned, before making a rather abrupt switch in deciding to ban him on January 8, saying<\/a> two tweets of his that day violated their \u201cglorification of violence\u201d policy and that Trump\u2019s account presented a \u201crisk of further incitement of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n Weiss points out that, earlier in the day, Twitter staffers evaluated those new Trump tweets \u2014 one saying he wouldn\u2019t attend the inauguration, another that \u201c75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me\u201d will \u201cnot be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!\u201d \u2014 and concluded<\/a> they did not violate policies against incitement of violence. Only later did top executives ask about other possible interpretations and begin discussing whether this was a coded \u201cglorification of violence\u201d interpretation. Weiss\u2019s implication is that, under immense internal and external pressure, Twitter\u2019s executives searched for a pretext to ban Trump, and found one. (The day before, Facebook had done something similar.)<\/p>\n Weiss also points out that this was the only time a sitting head of state was banned from the platform, and that Twitter previously allowed wide latitude to world leaders\u2019 accounts, even those who posted hateful rhetoric<\/a> or even direct calls to violence<\/a> (though it\u2019s not a surprise that social media companies would have different standards in different countries with very different political situations and that they might treat the company\u2019s home country somewhat differently).<\/p>\n Even if you accept Trump was treated differently, the question is whether that different treatment was justified and called for considering what Trump had done: launched a months-long campaign of constant falsehoods aimed at pressuring Republicans to steal the election from Joe Biden, a campaign that eventually spiraled into real-world violence when a mob stormed the US Capitol. In the view of many, American democracy was at stake here \u2014 it was not yet clear whether Trump really would step aside, and many feared further violence \u2014 so social media companies had a responsibility to act rather than enable its destruction. (Roth said<\/a> multiple Twitter employees had quoted Hannah Arendt\u2019s The Banality of Evil<\/em> to him, suggesting the company\u2019s blind adherence to process meant enabling something horrifying.)<\/p>\n What this really boils down to is a larger clash of worldviews related to Trump, and to which institutions should or should not be trusted.<\/p>\n One worldview \u2014 accepted to varying degrees by liberals, anti-Trump conservatives, and significant portions of the tech and media industries \u2014 was that Trump\u2019s presidency was an unprecedented threat to US democracy, that he was enabling a rise of hate toward minority groups that put lives at risk, that his constant lies amounted to an assault on the truth, and that a society-wide effort to resist him was necessary. \u201cBusiness as usual\u201d in media or tech companies is no longer tenable if you believe your country is sliding into authoritarianism, this argument goes. Journalists and tech workers shouldn\u2019t be neutral toward the prospect of American democracy ending, they should instead take a values-based stand in defense of it \u2014 and in defense of truth itself. <\/p>\n The violence of January 6 heightened concerns of further violent turmoil and pushed more people into this camp. \u201cI\u2019ve been part of the \u2018he\u2019s the president, we can\u2019t deactivate him\u2019 crowd for 4 years now but even I have to say, I feel complicit allowing this to happen and I would like to see him deactivated immediately,\u201d one Twitter employee wrote in the company\u2019s Slack, according to NBC News.<\/p>\n In contrast, the journalists reporting on the Twitter Files, as well as Musk himself, have a starkly different interpretation of politics. They aren\u2019t Trumpists (Taibbi is historically of the left, Weiss said she voted for Biden, Musk said he supports Ron DeSantis) but they\u2019ve become united by a loathing for what they see as the liberal groupthink that has become hegemonic in much of the media and Silicon Valley, which they argue chills dissent and free speech, and often advances the interests of the Democratic Party. This includes \u201cwokeness\u201d and cancel culture, but goes beyond those topics. For instance, they believe Trump got a raw deal in the Russia investigation \u2014 arguing many in the media, the Democratic Party, and the government either believed or willfully perpetrated what amounted to a false conspiracy theory that Trump was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. Whatever they might believe about Trump\u2019s flaws, their commentary shows that for some time they have been far more animated by what they see as the excesses of Trump\u2019s opponents in the media, tech companies, and the government.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re inclined to think Trump a singular threat that must be resisted \u2014 and you can point to the January 6 attacks as proof of your theory \u2014 then a major social media company banning him is more justifiable. But if you think the liberals at the social media company are themselves a major threat to speech, then the power they wielded in banning Trump may disquiet you.<\/p>\n Yet it should be noted that the phenomenon of controversial Twitter bannings occurring at top executives\u2019 whims has not been solved under the Musk regime. Musk has already decided to suspend Kanye West\u2019s account, keep a preexisting ban on Infowars host Alex Jones in place, and ban an account tracking flight information for Musk\u2019s private jet (even though he said last month<\/a> his \u201ccommitment to free speech\u201d was so strong he would allow that account to keep posting).<\/p>\n The Twitter Files has not featured a full installment about Covid-19 yet, but Musk has promised<\/a>, \u201cIt is coming bigtime.\u201d In part two<\/a> of the series, though, Weiss showed<\/a> that Stanford School of Medicine professor Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a Twitter \u201cTrends Blacklist\u201d \u2014 preventing his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches.<\/p>\n After this, Bhattacharya tweeted that<\/a>, during a visit to Twitter headquarters at Musk\u2019s invitation this week, employees told him he was placed on that blacklist the first day he joined Twitter, in August 2021 and that he believes<\/a> it must have been because of this tweet:<\/p>\nWas Twitter right to block the New York Post story about Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop?<\/h3>\n
Was Twitter right to ban Trump?<\/h3>\n
Did Twitter \u2014 or the Biden administration \u2014 overreach in efforts to limit Covid-19 misinformation?<\/h3>\n
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