Elon Musk’s tiresome Twitter takeover last year was ripe with controversies as half of the U.S. celebrated the billionaire’s self-proclaimed efforts to turn the social media site into a bulwark of online free speech, while the other half feared he would only unleash an unstoppable wave of hate speech and misinformation. Months later, the outcome is still debated and will likely continue to be so, but, in the meantime, one aspect of Twitter’s change of management cannot go unaddressed: the Twitter Files.
To recap, the Twitter Files are an array of internal documents belonging to the site’s previous management which were handed over by Elon Musk to a group of selected journalists in November last year to be analyzed and released by them onto Twitter. The importance of the documents, which have been released in 15 installments so far, lies in the fact that they reveal Twitter’s semi-conscious but heavy political bias in content moderation, its practice of disproportionately censoring conservative-leaning sources, and of promoting leftist talking points—often at the explicit request of political figures.
This article briefly summarizes the most important revelations of the Twitter Files so far. Not all of the files are open to the general public; it is up to Musk’s journalists to decide what (and how) they share the information in the documents they became privy to, released only after having first undergone selective scrutiny by Musk and his team. A complete chronology of all tweets within the Twitter Files, as well as a more in-depth summary of them, can be found here.
The Hunter Biden Story
Parts 1 and 7 (released by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) discuss the most burning question critics of Twitter’s free speech policies were preoccupied with over the past two years: did the platform try to hide information regarding the U.S. President’s son’s laptop scandal, and if yes, to what extent and on whose orders, essentially hiding the story about crack cocaine, prostitutes, and possible collusion of political and economic interests deep within the Biden family. As the unclassified files have shown, Twitter systematically suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, primarily at the urging of the FBI and intelligence community. They also reveal that the FBI became deeply embedded within Twitter, with a revolving door of personnel, top-secret security clearances for Twitter executives, and direct communication lines for censorship activities. The former FBI general counsel James Baker is specifically mentioned as being a key figure in this effort. However, Taibbi also admitted to seeing “no evidence of any government involvement in the laptop story” directly, but that it was the company’s own decision to censor related information in the end.
“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”
Parts 2, 3, 4, and 5 (Bari Weiss, Taibbi, and Shellenberger) confirmed another suspicion of the American Right, namely that for years, Twitter has systematically censored free speech and blacklisted conservative or contrarian voices. Those who were de-platformed or shadowbanned for nothing but their political views include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Kayleigh McEnany, the popular Libs of Tiktok account, and former President Donald Trump. The Twitter Files suggest that Twitter used a wide variety of mechanisms—such as building blacklists, preventing tweets from trending, blocking search results, and limiting the visibility of accounts and trending topics—to get the algorithm to hide the ’unwanted’ content or people.
Silencing an Incumbent President
As expected, the Twitter Files contribute more to the story of President Trump’s permanent suspension after the January 6th riot at Capitol Hill in 2021. The official reason the then-still incumbent POTUS’ account was taken down from Twitter was his alleged role in inciting the violence. Parts 3, 4, and 5 of the Files discuss the decision-making process behind banning President Trump’s account, and show that the political ideologies of Twitter employees and executives played a significant role in the outcome. They reveal, for instance, that between 2018 and 2022, 96% to 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to the Democratic Party. The decision to ban Trump is said to have been based on no specific policy violation (as the people tasked with assessing policy compliance admitted to having found no breach whatsoever). Moreover, Shellenberger drew attention to the fact that other world leaders never had to face the same treatment, regardless of how authoritarian they were. He even quotes the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny criticizing the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
Twitter as a Playground for Intelligence Agencies
Parts 6, 8, and 9 (by Taibbi and Lee Fang) revealed that the synergies between Twitter and the FBI (as well as others within the intelligence community, including the CIA and even the Department of Defense) have been endemic within the platform and other social media companies in Silicon Valley. The documents suggest that Twitter was effectively an “FBI subsidiary” and that it supported the U.S. military’s covert operations overseas, creating AI-generated deep fakes, and spreading disinformation and propaganda to artificially instill popular support for foreign policy decisions.
Political Pressure and RussiaGate
Parts 11 and 12 (by Taibbi) go further into analyzing the intelligence community’s use of Twitter, particularly regarding the Russian collusion theory in the aftermath of the 2016 election. As it turns out, Twitter found little to no evidence supporting the idea that Russian misinformation on social media helped sway the outcome of the election. However, intelligence agencies and politicians (including Hillary Clinton’s staff) forced it to take serious action against possible Russian trolls anyway, effectively censoring pro-Trump content in general. For partaking in the battle against ’misinformation,’ Twitter was directly paid over $3 million by the FBI itself. Part 14 (by Taibbi) went further down the rabbit hole of RussiaGate. It shows that in 2018, Twitter executives told Democratic congressmen that there were no Russian bots spreading propaganda on the site at the time. But when politicians (Schiff, Feinstein, and Blumenthal named) doubled down on the narrative, Twitter just rolled with it.
COVID-19 and the Post-Scientific World
Part 10 (by David Zweig) of the Twitter Files tells the story of how the company suppressed information that went against the established COVID-19 narrative, including original and peer-reviewed research by leading experts in their fields. What’s more, this often happened at the government’s request. The documents show that as far as what users were able to see on the site at the height of the pandemic—and long after—it was Twitter and the CDC who decided what The Science™ was: not the endless pursuit of truth through unyielding scientific scrutiny, but a dogmatic ideology bent on silencing dissenting voices.
Part 15 (by Fang) goes deeper into the layers of Twitter’s pandemic management, by revealing that the official narrative was not only set by the gatekeepers of science, but also by corporate interests. Big pharmaceutical companies and vaccine producers Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are specifically mentioned as the ones asking for “special content moderation” on behalf of their products, which included the censoring of people who questioned their vaccines’ efficacy or, in some cases, those who asked for cheaper doses. Finally, Part 13 (by Alex Berenson) further implicates Twitter’s anti-science escapades by revealing that Scott Gottlieb (former FDA Commissioner and current Pfizer board member) used Twitter to suppress content that he personally deemed dangerous misinformation. Twitter employees promptly obeyed his requests because of his past at the FDA, without even considering that his current position put him into a grave conflict of interest.
Is There More to Come?
In his initial thread, Taibbi claimed that he and the others obtained “thousands of internal documents.” Therefore, it is safe to assume that more Twitter Files will be released in the coming weeks and months.
