Musk initially invited Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to examine the company’s internal Slack messages and emails. Taibbi and Weiss are fierce critics of establishment media; Shellenberger is a strong anti-establishment voice on energy and homeless policy. All are, in
Weiss’ phrase, “politically homeless,” neither right nor left, but tend to write about aspects of the struggle between the elites and the public.
I happen to know all three and I subscribe to their Substack newsletters. They are clear thinkers and good writers but two traits, in my opinion, separate them from the pack: independence and integrity. Musk could have bought himself a passel of hired hacks who would have churned out whatever spin he wished. With these three authors he gave up control over the Twitter Files output in exchange for their ironclad credibility.
An enormous volume of information was filtered down to patchwork Twitter style. Since the format tends to lose the forest for the trees, we should fix our attention on what truly matters. Anyone with eyes to see could tell that a thumb was being pressed to the scales of the public sphere. Progressive cultural domination was never a question of superior arguments but of shutting down the other side. With Twitter Files, for the first time, we’ve gotten a glimpse into the byzantine machinery that makes such repression possible.
Although additional files continue to be made public, here, from my perspective, are the three most interesting revelations so far:
A company culture of control spawned tools and found targets to achieve that purpose. People didn’t go to work at Twitter to provide a service for the public. They were a bastion of the church. The job was to silence evil, mainly in the form of Trumpism, and to guard the carriers of revealed truth, who were all Democrats. A parallel world to reality was presented—one disfigured by delusional additions and crude amputations. To this purpose, “Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,”
Weiss learned. The targets were offenders against elite orthodoxy—a conservative activist, a right-wing talk show host, a Covid-dissenting doctor, among a host of others.
Twitter’s
mission statement is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.” That was the old idealism of the internet speaking. After conversion to the church, building barriers became the mission. Twitter was made into a closed pen in which heretical opinions disappeared without a trace or explanation. Top to bottom, the staff labored with zeal to add another brick to the wall—there was a joy in discussions of what constituted “violative” behavior equal in fervor to Talmudic commentary. Tools were designed that left disgraced users muttering in solitude. “The worst mistake I made,” stated
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, “was in continuing to invest in
tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus tools
for the people using Twitter to manage it for themselves.” Because identity is a jealous God, Dorsey’s mistake was unavoidable.
Devotion to a higher truth overrode Twitter’s own rules and procedures, not to mention moral scruples, and made blatant lying necessary. Twitter executives expelled dangerous heretics from their digital congregation, then gave fraudulent pretexts for doing so. We know the pretexts were fraudulent because, after the fact, these executives spent inordinate amounts of time debating on Slack whether any of the company’s rules had actually been violated. Sometimes the federal government provided cover; more on this below. More often, management went with the grim Vietnam War axiom: “When in doubt, take them out.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter
quickly “handled” multiple requests from the Biden camp to smother unfavorable content. Trump, however, was first red-flagged then “deamplified” in the run-up to the election. Following the January 6 madness in Washington, D.C., he was banished from Twitter permanently, despite the painful inability of company leaders, manifested in internal messages, to find some reason in their copious rule book that would justify expulsion. “[I]n this specific case, we are changing our public interest approach for this account,” fudged
Yoel Roth, a key player in the Trump affair who bore the ironic title of Head of Trust and Safety.
It should be understood that this was not a vast leftwing conspiracy but a striking instance of the elite hive mind at work and of the binding force of shared dogma: Trump, after all, was the Beelzebub of the established church. That force took the form of external pressure, as Democratic celebrities like Michelle Obama called for Trump to be evicted. It was also felt as internal pressure: 300 employees sent
a letter to Dorsey, published by The Washington Post, demanding an end to Trump’s “violent, hateful rhetoric.” But the most potent pressure on Twitter executives was unquestionably psychological. Roth’s dream was “to drive change in the world” and he
was certain there were “actual Nazis in the White House.” Action was redemption; when the ban was announced, employees fell into the Slack equivalent of a religious ecstasy.
Twitter management had gone
on record as stating, “We do not shadow ban [i.e., secretly block users]. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” We now know both claims were false—the melancholy question that lingers is whether the people making them possessed enough self-awareness to realize it. One peril in building a delusional world is that you may end up living there.
The Biden administration, and the federal law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracies, are deep in the business of controlling media content. Defenders of Twitter’s political dogmatism argue that the company is a private entity and can do as it wishes: First Amendment protection of free speech applies only to government censorship. This argument, though technically correct, loses some of its validity when all major institutions promote the same orthodoxy using more or less the same words. It collapses when it becomes clear that the federal government has been acting the part of grand inquisitor and pushing content decisions on its “private sector partners.”
The wall of obedience to power built around the Covid-19 crisis was the thickest and
most formidable of all. The surgeon general proclaimed an “infodemic” on the subject and said of the digital platforms: “We can’t wait for them longer to take aggressive action.” Biden accused social media of “killing people” by tolerating dissident opinions on vaccines. Under direct guidance from the White House, Twitter suppressed factual but contrarian information on the pandemic. Doctors and researchers who proposed alternate policies or reported flaws in the vaccine development process were muted or expelled. The White House singled out specific accounts it wished to eliminate. Twitter saluted and complied. (One account holder later sued; Twitter settled.) At a time when an open exchange of ideas was of existential importance, the administration chose to turn managing the pandemic into a department of the established church—and Twitter went along. The effects were literally incalculable.
Government surveillance and intervention took place under the pretense of blocking foreign influence. The FBI fronted a liaison process
that included the Justice Department, Homeland Security and CIA. No crimes were said to be committed, no investigations had been authorized, but nonetheless, in a “constant and pervasive” series of meetings and messages with Twitter management, the FBI pushed for action on content
and asked for “emergency disclosure” on users—essentially, solicitations for a warrantless search. A one-way platform, Teleporter, was set up at Twitter to receive such requests and at one point FBI reportedly
deployed 80 people to work on social media-related issues. Given that the missions seemed increasingly to converge, it isn’t surprising that FBI personnel migrated to Twitter in large numbers. Among them was
James Baker, who played a leading role in driving the investigation of Trump while at the FBI and became a strong advocate of expelling Trump after he moved to Twitter. Money changed hands, too: The FBI
paid Twitter $3.4 million.
The overall purpose of the system was plain enough: to protect the Biden campaign and administration. I won’t repeat the sordid details surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s enough to say that the FBI lied to Twitter, Twitter lied to the public and the lies
were blessed by 52 retired intelligence luminaries, most of them from CIA. In the parallel reality of the elites, the laptop story became a Russian disinformation hack. A potential scandal six weeks before a presidential election was repressed by both mainstream and digital media. I can’t recall an equal perversion of the truth in my long lifetime. But the system worked.
In secret, while posing as an independent platform, Twitter had allowed itself to become an instrument of control by the state and the party in power. The protection of democracy somehow entailed Chinese methods of handling information—and the lone poignant moment in Twitter Files came when an
unnamed employee recognized the trend. “Maybe because I’m from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation,” the employee worried. The concern was met with a volley of refutations and promptly dismissed as wrong-think.
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