“The Twitter Files” weren’t a “nothingburger,” but they also weren’t the Pentagon Papers.
Removed from culture war tribalism and performative outrage (which includes outrage that other people aren’t outraged enough about the thing you’re outraged about), the “Twitter Files” are legitimately newsworthy. They show just how cavalier the social media gatekeepers of information are about following their own content moderation policies, and how cozy they are with the Democratic establishment.
They also show just how far those gatekeepers will go to keep their users from sharing a controversial story about a presidential candidate’s son (going so far as to treat it as they would child porn, and forbidding users from even sharing the story in direct messages) weeks before an election.
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Indeed, an old lesson has resurfaced in the wake of Matt Taibbi’s Elon Musk-sourced and approved tweetstorm on how the pre-Musk Twitter brass suppressed a New York Post report on materials pilfered from an abandoned Hunter Biden laptop. And that lesson is “Don’t trust (or demand) billionaire tech bros to be the arbiters of truth and news.” I’ve made the point myself, repeatedly.
I have little interest in litigating Taibbi’s decision to “agree to certain conditions” to get his hands on the “Twitter Files”—which apparently included having to tweet the story out in 280-character increments, which he did, inexplicably, over the course of several hours. The stunt quality of the rollout completely undermined the seriousness of its content—which in turn made right-wing Twitter furious that “the mainstream” wasn’t taking the story seriously. Is Taibbi the bravest, most honest journalist in the world for daring to his offend his own left-leaning tribe? Or is he a duplicitous hack who sold his soul to the world’s richest man in exchange for some Twitter clout? I’ll let someone else write that column.
Twitter’s suppression of a story about a laptop full of dirty pictures and emails suggesting possible corruption by a future president’s son is outrageous, to some degree. But despite Musk’s attempt to paint it as “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” it simply was not.
And some of the outrage was more than a little hyperbolic.
Mike Solana—vice president for right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund—tweeted: “...people capable of silencing literally the fucking president wield real power, and power must be held to account.”
Another Peter Thiel employee, Intellectual Dark Web-coiner Eric Weinstein, tweeted that Twitter’s former bosses are “evil souls, covertly playing G-d over news, elections, reputations, direct ideological manipulation of human discourse passing through their servers.”
Viva Frei, a YouTuber who insists he’s not right-wing, tweeted: “Forget the ‘Twitter files’…Unleash the ‘Covid files’. Unleash the ‘Julian Assange files’. Unleash the ‘Seth Rich files’. Unleash it all, @elonmusk. You didn’t buy a company. You bought a crime scene.” [sic]
Because it is possible to have two non-exclusive opinions about a hot-button news story with culture war implications, I’d posit that politically motivated corporate censorship is a genuinely bad thing for democracy. And yes, Taibbi’s tweetstorm revealed that Joe Biden’s campaign leaned on Twitter—just as Donald Trump’s campaign did (which Taibbi ever-so-briefly noted).
But Trump was the one in power at the time, not Biden. And it was the New York Post that made the story all but impossible to authenticate by not allowing other news outlets access to the story’s source material, which came from the shadiest sources in Trump’s swamp. But, to repeat, Biden was not in office and therefore could not use the force of government to pressure Twitter to do anything.
Squint at it as hard as you want, it’s not state censorship.
But here are some things that do qualify as state censorship:
“Blue Lives Matter” laws, which treat police officers as a protected identity group, criminalizing being less than reverential to cops as hate crimes.
The scores of state laws and pending bills that use the force of government to ban classroom discussion (even in colleges) of “divisive topics”—a deliberately subjective and overbroad definition that could mean literally anything, but is openly intended to suppress ideas that run counter to “My Country, Right or Wrong” Americans’ very sensitive feelings.
While the pro-censorship free speech tourists of the right insist they only want to ban books from schools and libraries that are sexually graphic, or which teach white kids to be ashamed of themselves for being born white—in fact, these laws are being used to ban books about Black Olympic champions growing up in the Jim Crow-era South, among countless other absurd cases. It’s a perverse reality—Republican-imposed state censorship of American history in the name of patriotism and free speech.
And as The New York Times reported this past weekend, GOP abortion bans around the country have also (predictably) become free speech battlefronts:
“In Nebraska, law enforcement obtained a warrant to search a teenager’s private Facebook messages, in which she told her mother of her urgent desire to end her pregnancy. The mother is now being prosecuted on charges of helping her daughter abort the pregnancy by giving advice about abortion pills.
Proposed legislation in South Carolina would have made it unlawful to provide information about abortions. In September, the University of Idaho issued guidance that it might be illegal for employees to ‘promote’ birth control or abortion. In Texas, two abortion funds (groups that help people pay and travel for abortions) this year received deposition demand letters from people tied to anti-abortion lawmakers for information on anyone who has ‘aided and abetted’ the procedure.
And in Oklahoma, some library workers were warned about helping patrons find information about abortion, or even uttering the word. In an email, the employees were told they could face a $10,000 fine, jail time or even lose their jobs if they didn’t comply.”
The anti-snowflake, pro-free speech, “primacy of the individual” wing of American politics is passing laws to create safe spaces from “unpatriotic” viewpoints, and criminalizing the sharing of information about reproductive rights. And a great many political commentators of the “heterodox center”—who almost exclusively punch left, but insist they’re not right-wing because they’re nominally pro-choice—couldn’t be bothered to whip up outrage over these transgressions on free expression, but they do have a boundless supply of indignation for things like the “Twitter Files.”
And if we’re balancing the ledger of outrageous politically motivated actions of the moment, the “Twitter Files” are a blip compared to the “antics” of the de facto head of the Republican Party, the once and possibly future president Donald Trump.
Gaslighters will tar you as afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for (gasp!) expressing outrage over the 45th president’s pointed refusal to condemn the antisemites who showered him with obsequious praise over dinner in his home a few weeks ago. And don’t you dare observe that Trump’s comfortability with actual white supremacists (the real, self-avowed, “blood and soil” kind) might actually be a GOP problem, rather than just exclusively a Trump problem.
The right also wants you to get over Jan. 6 already, as if “Jan. 6” was just an optically embarrassing riot. But Jan. 6 wasn’t a mere riot—it was just one episode of a long-running coup attempt.
Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.
Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesHere’s just a very small sampling of things we know to be true.
Trump lost the election. And for months thereafter, this factually based information was repeated to him by scores of people who can’t be confused with woke saboteurs—including (but hardly limited to) Republican state election officials, his daughter, and his own pitbull attorney general, Bill Barr, who told the 45th president that his delusions of voter fraud are “bullshit.” We know Trump leaned on Georgia Republican state election officials, demanding they “find” enough votes for him to win. We know there was coordination in the upper echelons of Trump’s political inner circle with neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. And we know that Trump lit the fuse that sparked the Capitol riot.
He has also done untold damage to millions of Americans’ faith in the democratic process—millions of Americans who believe they are living in a country with an illegitimate president.
For God’s sake, just days ago the man posted in a rant on his Twitter knockoff site that his fictitious stolen election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Are these just Trump “antics”? Or, based on past experience, is this some legitimately dangerous incitement?
When a Trumpist ex-congressional candidate tweets in response to Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” thread that, “We can no longer get rid of tyranny by the ballots. It's only by bullets now,” is it really an overreaction to be concerned that in addition to “lone wolves,” there is an armed and organized right-wing movement that believes it takes marching orders from Trump? And is it really pearl-clutching to be furious that many (though not all) leaders of Trump’s party are still too chickenshit to completely disavow this embarrassment, this maniac, this criminal?
Speaking on ABC News this Sunday, Ohio Rep. Dan Joyce responded to George Stephanopoulos’ question about Trump calling for the Constitution to be obliterated: “He says a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that it's ever going to happen. So you got to [separate] fact from fantasy…”
I’d never expect a profiles in courage from members of Congress (of either party), but the depth of cowardice among Republicans and conservative commentators in their efforts to minimize, deflect, or ignore the threat Trump poses to any number of freedoms—particularly free speech, which includes voting—is an outrage in itself.
So, am I bothered by Twitter’s former bosses’ handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story? Yes. They were way too amenable to do the bidding of Democratic politicians, and they changed their content moderation policies on a whim in an effort to suppress what turned out to be a legitimate news story weeks before an election. (Although, acceding to the Biden campaign’s request to take nude photos shared without consent off of the site doesn’t bother me in the slightest.)
While I admit to holding my nose and voting for Biden in 2020, I bear no allegiance to him (or any politician). If Republicans want to investigate Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in Ukraine, have at it. If you’ve got the goods to prosecute him, by all means, nail the nepotism baby. And if you find corruption that leads all the way to the “big guy” himself, I’d support efforts to impeach, convict, and imprison President Biden, too. (Please also find the time to investigate Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar deals with the Saudi government and the fast-tracking of trademark requests for Ivanka Trump’s businesses by the Chinese government—while both of them were serving as White House senior advisers.)
But if we’re measuring outrage, I hope you’ll pardon me for not having a fainting spell over a social media site censoring a news story of questionable provenance—with sourcing so shady that several New York Post reporters refused to be bylined on it, and one of the reporters who was bylined did almost no work on the story, and didn’t know she was credited as a co-author until after the piece was published. (I also find it highly dubious that the story, knowing all we know about its content today, would have been the October surprise game-changer that Trumpists want to believe it to be.)
Measured against the specter of an authoritarian psychotic who pals around with white nationalists and antisemites, whose followers have already demonstrated their commitment to violence—and whose party is actively imposing widespread state censorship—Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop barely raises my hackles.
