What are the 'Twitter Files': the war for truth in the Musk era

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Last Friday, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted: "What really happened to the Hunter Biden deletion story on Twitter will be posted here on Twitter at 5pm."

And immediately: "It will be incredible", along with the popcorn emoji.

He even had an international case name: The Twitter

.

This Friday the second installment of the “archives” came out.

It was about the alleged “shadow banning”

Twitter exercised against some accounts.

There is only one problem at the moment: it has not been “incredible”.

This will be awesome 🍿

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022

First, a little background on Hunter Biden.

Hunter is the son of US President Joe Biden.

In October 2020, his alleged laptop surfaced and the

a newspaper affiliated with Donald Trump, published a story suggesting that Hunter had used his last name to obtain business in Ukraine when his father was Obama's vice president. .

The Trump campaign tried to escalate the controversy to the so-called "October surprise": a calamitous event for a candidate weeks before the November elections.

But he never caught on.

Twitter and Facebook limited the dissemination of the

article .

Facebook only prevented its algorithms from promoting it, but Twitter prevented the publication of the link to the piece, both in tweets and in direct messages.

They even temporarily suspended the

account for not wanting to delete the link.

17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop: https://t.co/q4zaMw6aVV

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

This is the context of what happened three weeks before the 2020 elections. Since then, Hunter Biden's laptop has been the great example of the excess power of technology companies, their obvious progressivism and their collusion with the Democratic Party in the US Musk has arrived to save Twitter from the clutches of progressivism.

Now that he owns Twitter, digging through the emails of Twitter executives and revealing this alleged collusion seemed like an easy win.

Musk shared this documentation with two freelance journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Last Friday Taibbi posted a thread on Twitter with 36 messages.

This was the great promise of Taibbi's second tweet: “The 'Twitter Files' tell an incredible story from inside one of the largest and most influential social networks in the world.

story

of a human-built mechanism that grows outside the control of its designer."

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

This is what is worth noting about this curious story, which says more about its protagonists than about the fact.

1/ There is no surprising revelation for now.

Although belated, these "Twitter Files" now have two chapters.

There is nothing bloody in any of them, although it is interesting to see how they discuss and make decisions within a company and how they have been counted out.

There's also some debate about what kind of access journalists have had to Twitter's internal tools: they've posted screenshots of Slack messages from former Twitter executives.

Even so, there are no phrases or expressions out of tune.

After 2016, the networks were protected with rules on the dissemination of

material .

In the case of Twitter, they established that the dissemination of that information was going to be prevented.

After the foreign interference in 2016, caution was even excessive because they could end up blocking accounts and tweets from the media and politicians.

So it happened.

Hunter Biden's strange laptop, which had passed through several hands and which experts later verified that other people had put files in, was a hypothetical case.

All the alarms went off and Taibbi's tweets reveal only a group of executives discussing whether, given the lack of information, they should apply their own rule or not.

There are even emails from a Democratic congressman telling them that they are going too far and better stop doing it.

The then chief executive, Jack Dorsey, explained the decision on his day in Congress and how it was revoked days later.

This is something that was already known and the revelation did not add anything new.

"Not once did anyone in [the emails] Taibbi reveal suggest anything remotely politically motivated," writes analyst Mike Masnick.

"There was legitimate concern internally about whether or not it was right to block the

story , which makes sense, because they were (rightly) concerned about making a decision that went too far."

The infamous first amendment violation [that the government cannot limit free speech] requires that there be government meddling to block that story.

But then in the White House there was Trump.

Perhaps the only half-remarkable revelation is that both parties had asked Twitter to remove messages, as any Twitter user can.

Of the republicans he does not give examples;

Of the Democrats, the examples are basically photos of Hunter Biden's parties where he appears naked, which violate another Twitter policy.

3. Take, for example, Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children.

Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

On the "shadow censorship" revealed by Bari Weiss, the war is over the meaning of words.

Dorsey and other executives explained in 2018 that they were limiting the exposure of some tweets and that this was not "shadow censorship."

The debate is so fine that basically it is the same practice that Musk now wants to do for tweets that violate his rules: "freedom of expression, but not freedom of scope," he said, which means that you can say everything you want, but This does not imply that Twitter "makes it easy" for your hate message to appear in searches, responses, or on other users' timelines.

In Weiss's 30 message thread, there are examples of how this was applied with the juicy name for example "trend blacklist".

That is the great test.

2/ Permanent attention is winning.

Until here, the story.

Musk achieves with these "Twitter Archives" at least two objectives: one, to remain in the spotlight and to give a greater sense of how important Twitter is, which is convenient for him as an owner.

Two, "re-center" Twitter after its accusations of being "leftist."

This page is from Trump's booklet: the important thing is to get people talking.

There will always be someone who defends you and is happy that you make political rivals angry.

Today there are dozens of videos and podcasts on the internet that create hours of content on Twitter from 36 tweets with little information.

Most say it's an amazing scandal and others say there's hardly anything.

But knowing for sure what happens is more difficult.

It's not that before, in a world with fewer voices, it was easier to know what's going on.

But now it's just as complicated.

3/ Journalists do not belong to traditional media.

Taibbi and Weiss come from very traditional backgrounds and today have

successful

magazine

, Weiss at the

and the

.

Of course they make a much better living now.

Even Weiss has founded a medium

[La Prensa Libre] with other journalists from traditional media.

He has taken advantage of the "Twitter Archives" to give it more hype.

Its main sections are politics, science and common sense.

I'm so proud of the team we are building and the journalism we are doing @TheFP.

We're just getting started.

https://t.co/4xOEef306D

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

Mainstream journalists repeatedly criticized Taibbi for playing "the world's richest man's publicist."

Taibbi defended himself by saying that these journalists have written articles with anonymous sources from the FBI or other government departments.

Taibbi had to agree to "certain conditions" from Musk that he has not disclosed.

A pretty clear one is probably to post the "research" in the form of a thread and not in his

From him.

4/ The media hide it!

The first two days after the thread, the cry of those who saw an incredible scandal was that "the media hide it."

The

and the

carried brief pieces on the event because they had not been able to see those documents, which they had also requested.

If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves?

Including all discussions around current and future actions?

Make everything public now.

#TwitterFiles

— jack (@jack) December 7, 2022

The alleged concealment of the media is an indispensable element of the narrative: “At some point you may have noticed that what you read did not reflect what you saw with your own eyes,” says the founding manifesto of The Free Press.

"At another time, you may have noticed that people who get paid to tell you the world as it is, instead told you the world as they wanted it to be."

They, they add, saw this process from within.

Now they are going back to the roots of journalism and truth.

Can be.

The problem in these apparent battles is that both sides supposedly have vested interests, not just the media or the government.

Dorsey asked Musk that if he was so concerned about transparency that he stop putting it out in installments with two trusted journalists and publish everything.

Musk promised that he will.

Meanwhile, we will continue playing the truth in the age of networks.

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