I’m sorry, but the Twitter Files are not a “nothingburger.”
The information revealed so far about Twitter’s internal deliberations shows that the company’s “content moderation” decisions were often justified on grounds that the decision-makers themselves found dubious. The company routinely honored censorship requests from powerful factions, and some political commentators were “shadow banned” in a way that appears to be inconsistent with Twitter’s stated policies at the time.
The examples we’ve seen, at this point, have focused on the complaints of conservatives, and many of my fellow progressives have reacted by rolling their eyes. But this is a short-sighted response. Twitter is an important part of our “digital town square,” used by politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens to disseminate news and make political appeals. Anyone who cares about free speech should care about this information.
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But precisely because the Twitter Files are important, the way they’ve been rolled out is problematic. Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, who recently acquired Twitter, has released the information to a small circle of deeply polarizing media figures. These figures seem to share substantial elements of Musk’s culture-war agenda, and the way they’ve released the information to the public often lacks important context and analysis.
There’s an easy solution to this problem. Musk could release the original raw information so that journalists across the political spectrum could access it and perform their own analysis. The day he does that, he’ll deserve credit for transparency. Until then, not so much.
Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger Walk Into a Leak…
When Matt Taibbi first started tweeting information about Twitter’s decision to censor information about Hunter Biden, it was probably inevitable that the leaks would become a culture-war football. Taibbi is a polarizing figure, widely perceived by progressives as a former compatriot who now seems entirely too chummy with the other team.
Bari Weiss is an even bigger culture-war lightning rod than Taibbi. She first made her name attacking the academic freedom of university professors whose views she deemed “anti-Israel.” To be fair, she was a college student then, but as a pundit in her late thirties she hasn’t stopped recklessly accusing supporters of the Palestinian cause of antisemitism. Somewhat jarringly—given her history of trying to cancel people on the basis of dubious accusations of bigotry—in the last few years she’s emerged as a prominent critic of wokeness and cancel culture. And Weiss was the one who picked up Taibbi’s baton for the second installment of the “Twitter Files.”
After Weiss and Taibbi traded off installments for a while, a third contributor was brought on—Michael Shellenberger, an anti-woke culture warrior who once wrote a book called, and I promise I’m not making this up, San Fransicko.
With a crew like that in charge of disseminating the information, it’s not surprising that they’ve focused on the cases most likely to outrage conservatives—the “shadow banning” of MAGA commentators like Charlie Kirk, the outright banning of Donald Trump, and the decision to censor the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden—and it’s even less surprising that conservatives have celebrated the Twitter Files, while progressives have dismissed the whole thing as a “nothingburger.”
That’s how the culture war goes. One side trumpets information seen as embarrassing to their enemies, and the other is primed to see the alleged scandal as overwrought nonsense. It’s a familiar script. But it’s worth taking a long step back and acknowledging that there are issues at play here about free speech and corporate control of our digital public square far more important than how anyone feels about media figures like Taibbi, Weiss or Shellenberger.
The decisions of “Twitter 1.0” may well have hurt the right much more than the left—although we won’t know that for certain until the original information is released. But this would be a particularly short-sighted reason for the left to dismiss corporate censorship as an unimportant issue.
As a matter of principle, the left has historically supported free speech. It makes very little sense for progressives to adopt a narrow libertarian view of freedom whereby only government censorship can count as a problem—as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic puts it, the left has always understood that “that repression is just as likely to come from private actors as the state and is just as outrageous when it does.” And as a matter of self-interest, it’s self-defeating to ignore the potential for future censorship to target the left.
That would have been true even if Twitter had stayed under its old management. The kind of mainstream Democrats most likely to end up as decision-makers at a corporation like Twitter are unlikely to be sympathetic to the Bernie Sanders-aligned left. And Twitter 2.0 is run by a man who regularly tweets about “the woke mind-virus” and his deep hatred of both liberals and leftists. He’s already shown himself to be, at best, extremely inconsistent in his alleged commitment to free speech. Who do you think he’s going to censor?
Predictably, some conservatives have hyped Taibbi/Weiss/Shellenberger revelations up to the point of absurdity. In a tweet with tens of thousands of likes, right-wing commentator Pedro Gonzalez said he wouldn’t be happy until former Twitter executives Jack Dorsey and Yoel Roth were in prison—even though no one has actually alleged that either man broke any laws.
That’s ridiculous. But it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant that the private corporation that owns our digital commons was routinely rubber-stamping censorship requests from powerful factions, and justified its decisions in ways its executives knew couldn’t be justified by the site’s official policies. If anything, the fact that no laws were broken is scandalous in itself.
It underscores that these oligarch-owned tech platforms are almost totally unregulated—something progressives should see as a problem.
Free Speech and the Left
Progressive commentator Eric Levitz has argued that nothing particularly outrageous is revealed in the Twitter Files. On Bari Weiss’s revelation that Charlie Kirk was “shadow banned” despite the company having previously denied that they do “such things,” Levitz claims that there’s no evidence of any disconnect between Twitter’s behavior and how the company previously described its practices.
After all, when Twitter executives denied that they engaged in “shadow banning,” they defined the term in a way that wouldn’t apply to Kirk’s situation. (His account was placed on a “Do Not Amplify” list.) And on Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Levitz argues that nothing in the information revealed by Taibbi shows that “the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.”
Neither of these defenses are particularly convincing.
When Twitter denied the “shadow banning” rumor, it defined “shadow banning” as “deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” Levitz is right that in this sense, Twitter doesn’t “shadow ban.” But Twitter was being slippery in denying that it “shadow banned” while defining “shadow banning” as the most extreme version of what someone could mean by that term.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, people who think their accounts have been “shadow banned” know perfectly well that their tweets are discoverable by others—they tweet “I think I’ve been shadow banned,” people like and reply to those tweets, the original poster interacts with those replies, and so on. What people are concerned with in these instances is not that Twitter has intentionally made their tweets completely undiscoverable to anyone else without informing them, but rather that Twitter has intentionally limited the reach of their tweets without informing them.
It's also true that Twitter openly said at the time that “limiting visibility” was one of its enforcement tools. But the only cases in which it had ever admitted to doing so were narrow and uncontroversial cases like limiting tweets by users who tried to manipulate the algorithm by using unrelated hashtags. Shadow banning the accounts of political commentators who pretty much never tweet anything but political commentary is pretty clearly not the sort of thing Twitter was open about doing.
And Levitz’s take on Twitter censoring the New York Post story is even less convincing.
He rightly points out that the ban was very short-lived. After a day of immense backlash, the company backed down. But however short-lived, the draconian measures Twitter imposed to stop people from spreading the article were jaw-dropping. As Taibbi notes, “White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story.” And Twitter was trying so hard to clamp down that users were briefly stopped from even DM-ing each other the article. If Twitter had done that in 2016 to stop the spread of news coverage about Trump’s “grab them by the p*ssy” Access Hollywood tape, liberals and leftists wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—think that the company quickly backing down in the face of backlash made it an insignificant incident. And there might not have been enough backlash to matter if we were talking about a story spread not by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, but by a small independent outlet.
Was the decision motivated by Twitter executives’ desire to avoid being “complicit in promulgating hacked materials,” rather than a desire to influence the election? Maybe so—but so what? If Twitter had existed in 1971, the same rationale could have been used to suppress the Pentagon Papers. Journalists are allowed to publish materials leaked to them by people who illegally obtained them. A ban on that is a ban on investigative journalism.
Levitz points out that it’s not illegal or even particularly unusual for politicians or even government officials to request that media organizations not publish news stories. That’s true. But from a left perspective—suspicious of corporate and government wrongdoing and the journalists who enable it—that’s a bad thing. A news organization that routinely accedes to such requests is doing something wrong and deserves to be exposed and embarrassed. And a neutral platform that does so is much worse.
Here’s an analogy:
Imagine that hardcore libertarians implement their agenda. The U.S. Postal Service is privatized. One of the biggest private mail carriers starts refusing to carry magazines that have printed “possibly hacked” materials embarrassing to powerful actors. See the problem?
What Else Is In There?
In the first installment of the Files, Matt Taibbi reveals that during the 2020 election censorship requests “from both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House were received and honored.” But Taibbi provides no examples of requests from the Trump team. He just assures us in passing that the “assessment” of “current and former” high-level executives is that Twitter’s censorship targeted the right in a lopsided way.
That may well be true. In the pre-Musk era of Twitter, decision-makers at the company were far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. But it’s maddening that we have to take Taibbi’s word for it. And the fact that we’re only being shown tiny shreds of information only reinforces the instinct of anyone who doesn’t share Musk’s agenda to dismiss the revelations.
Why exactly was Kirk’s account limited? Were there small left-wing accounts—who didn’t start out with millions of followers like Kirk—who received the same treatment? If Democrats and Republicans both requested censorship for partisan reasons, what other corporate or governmental actors requested it for other reasons? How about pro-Palestinian accounts?
More generally: We know what’s in Twitter’s internal documents that confirms the narrative championed Musk and the three people he’s shared his information with—but we have no idea what else is in there and how it might complicate that narrative.
For the sake of real transparency, Musk could simply do a Wikileaks-style dump of all these internal emails and related documents—perhaps with a few clearly indicated redactions of particularly sensitive information—that any journalist or interested citizen could access. Failing that, he could at least pick several journalists hailing from different political factions to receive the documents and do their own analysis. Ideally, this group would include people with a history of criticizing Elon Musk. (Taibbi has a history of criticizing Musk, but that was years ago, when Taibbi positioned himself very differently.)That would give Musk’s leaks real credibility. Instead, he’s entrusted them to three pundits sharing his own agenda.
How our corporate overlords manage our digital public square is an issue of real public interest. And for exactly that reason, it’s too important to be left in the hands of Musk and three of his fans.
