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Starting on December 2, Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, gave select reporters access to internal Twitter deliberations involving the October 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, its decision to suspend the account of former President Donald Trump, and other high-profile content moderation decisions. Findings were published on Twitter in five parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Twitter
The right argues that the disclosures show evidence of Twitter’s bias against conservatives.
“It wasn’t too long ago that this secretive ‘shadowbanning’ policy was dismissed by establishment media as just another right-wing conspiracy. Now we know for sure that it wasn’t… “Users who questioned COVID-19 policies, including school shutdowns, were put on a ‘Trends Blacklist’ that prevented their tweets from trending. Other prominent conservative commentators, such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, were slapped with ‘Do Not Amplify’ and ‘Search Blacklist’ labels. The popular Libs of TikTok account was suspended repeatedly and prevented from posting despite internal admission from Twitter officials that she hadn’t violated any of its policies…
“These revelations follow the first Twitter Files dump, which revealed Twitter’s aggressive effort to suppress circulation of the New York Post’s bombshell report about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Both reports thus far prove Twitter acted the way you’d expect a leftist activist to: taking orders from Democratic members of the incoming Biden administration, cracking down on content that questioned or challenged leftist ideology, and punishing users who resisted its efforts.”
Kaylee McGhee White, Washington Examiner
“Twitter executives [also] met weekly with FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence officials to discuss ‘disinformation’ they felt should be removed from the site… You don’t need a state ministry of information if the media voluntarily maintains official narratives and suppresses dissenting views. And what emerges from these files is the notion of an effective state media in America — an alliance of media, business and political figures who act, not out of government compulsion, but out of personal conviction…
“The notion of a privately-run state media is reinforced by the response to these disturbing disclosures — a virtual news blackout, with most major media offering little coverage of the disclosures. Just as Twitter suppressed dissenting or opposing views in a myriad of ways, many in the media are minimizing coverage of this scandal.”
Jonathan Turley, The Hill
“Twitter has immense power. You might not be on Twitter, but trust me, almost everybody who makes decisions in the media is. That's why so many media leftists have raised hell about Musk's takeover of Twitter: they understand correctly how much power the platform has over shaping public discourse, and they are outraged that Elon Musk, its new owner, wants to make it more fair and balanced. I don't think they are being disingenuous, either. We have seen very clearly that [Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety] Yoel Roth is a creature of the world of liberal elite ideas…
“If these revelations don't spur Congress to act to regulate high tech, what will? I am not a lawyer, so I don't know what's possible within constitutional parameters -- but I know well that Republicans and free-speech advocates had better start thinking hard about this, and formulating a plan… The emergence of the digital realm has revealed how inadequate pre-Internet standards governing speech and discourse are. Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon have power far in excess of anything imaginable prior to the invention of the Internet… Twitter, for one, is less like a newspaper and more like a public utility.”
Rod Dreher, American Conservative
The left argues that the disclosures cherry-pick data to fit a narrative being pushed by conservatives.
The left argues that the disclosures cherry-pick data to fit a narrative being pushed by conservatives.
“Nothing in Taibbi’s reporting indicated that Twitter had suppressed the Post story at the request of the Biden campaign, let alone of government officials… Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day…
“The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then ‘handled’ them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service…
“Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints… The Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
“The subjectivity of moderation decisions across the social web poses tremendous and complicated problems… But there’s no secret conspiracy: These claims largely comport with what Twitter has publicly stated about its moderation policies over the past few years. Since May 2018, Twitter has noted that it will change how a user appears in the site’s search feature if that user behaves in a way that ‘detracts from healthy public conversation.’ Twitter has an entire Frequently Asked Questions page dedicated to this type of de-amplification.”
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic
“What we really want to know is whether [Twitter] routinely de-amplified conservative voices more than liberal ones… [Weiss] provides the names of three political actors who were de-amplified: Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok). And that's it. Weiss doesn't explain why she picked these three to highlight. She doesn't say why these three were de-amplified. Nor does she say if she also knows of any liberals who were de-amplified…
“And even though Musk has given her access to anything she wants to see, she provides no statistics about how many people were de-amplified; the reasons they were de-amplified; how long they were de-amplified; or anything else… [This will not] bolster [Musk’s] reputation as a free speech defender unless he makes everything public, not just a few items cherry picked by a trio of lib-hating journalists.”
Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking
“At their best, the Twitter Files show that, well, content moderation is really hard… Not only is Elon Musk learning that lesson firsthand, but he’s even celebrating the curbing of hate speech on his platform by denying ‘freedom of reach.’… “The mission of the Twitter Files, at least as Musk and co. put it, is to increase transparency… That supposed goal is undermined by employing a misleading definition of shadowbanning, and by invoking it as a convenient catchall grievance instead of as a term with actual meaning.”
Nitish Pahwa, Slate
A libertarian's take
“The lack of transparency is startling, and the rationale behind the policy is wholly contrary to a culture of free speech… Previous Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth admitted in internal Slack conversations that ‘the hypothesis underlying much of what we've implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.’…
“That's a very fraught proposition that would appear to justify an extreme amount of censorship. As always, it's important to keep in mind that social media moderators, misinformation beat reporters, federal health advisers, and national intelligence officials have all failed to correctly distinguish actual misinformation from true information—the New York Post laptop story being just one prominent example.”
Robby Soave, Reason
