Why Twitter Files Matter
Twitter Files reveal that censorship on the platform was on occasions directly coordinated by the US security services and administration. Not everyone seems to understand the threats that it poses.
On March the 9th, two journalists – Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The topic of the day was the Twitter Files, which, alongside Taibbi and Shellenberger, has been also reported by several other authors like Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig. It all started from billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in late October last year. His decisions to stand up for freedom of expression on that social media platform, as opposed to restricting it, and to review the company's arbitrary decisions on moderation, censorship and its blocking of users, led to a very painful Musk-critical reaction by the mainstream media – as evidenced below.
To demonstrate how Twitter, being a platform of great importance for exchanging ideas and information, had suppressed freedom of expression for its users, Musk invited select journalists to review internal company documents and correspondence. These revelations should make the hairs on the backs of all rational people who value individual freedoms stand up.
Keeping the Covid narrative
The most recent report on Twitter Files so far, 19th in sequence, was released by Taibbi on the same 9th of March that he testified before the Congress. It focused on a Stanford University project, the Virality Project, that had set out to identify, analyse and draw attention to misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines circulating on various social media channels.
In reality, the project became a tool for blocking the unconvenient truths on the topic – e.g. people's stories about vaccine damage were labelled as false, misleading or inappropriate, as was any talk about the laboratory origins of the virus. The actual truth that contracting the disease gave better immunity to people than vaccines did was also seen as “false information”, the same went for the possibility that vaccinated people could contract the virus, even though this could be observed and seen in real time everywhere. Among other issues, there were concerns that truthful content, such as people's stories of vaccine injuries, could contribute to vaccine hesitancy, and thus be undesirable to be in the public domain. Correspondence with the project shows that Twitter's engagement in it was very obliging and they were making a real effort to comply.
In addition, former US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Scott Gottlieb, who has been part of Pfizer's management team since June 2019, had a direct line to Twitter through a similar model of “countering false information”. In August 2021, Gottlieb wrote to a Twitter employee that a post by Dr. Brett Giroir, which truthfully, citing the results of a study, claimed that immunity from infection was superior to vaccine immunity, was "corrosive" and would “end up going viral”. The same post actually ended on a call to vaccinate anyway, but Twitter still flagged the statement as "misleading".
Twitter also used shadow banning as a tactic to block the circulation of posts by popular users who were critical towards government or certain government policies. This “black list” included Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical professor who criticised the Covid policy, Dan Bongino, a US political commentator from the republican side, and Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and radio host. It turned out the company had previously been lying on the very topic: a Twitter spokesperson had claimed in 2018 that they do not engage in such practices and they “certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology”.
State interference – Hunter Biden laptop saga
Besides humbly complying with the Covid narrative presented by the government and the pharma-industry and censoring differing viewpoints, Twitter was also subject to direct political pressure already years before. By the time of the 2020 presidential election, the situation had evolved to the point where presidential campaign teams were free to write to Twitter which accounts or posts they would prefer not to see, and the company took action. For example, in October 2020, one company employee sent links of various individuals' Twitter accounts to another employee and wrote: "...more to be reviewed from the Biden team". "Handled," the other employee responded.
However, one of the most striking examples of ideological partisanship and politically-driven decisions being made on Twitter is the case of the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of the US President Joe Biden. In October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election that Donald Trump lost to incumbent Joe Biden, the New York Post published an article based on emails and documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop. The newspaper was not secretive about their source and openly admitted they got the material form Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani had gotten the copy of the hard drive of Hunter Biden's computer from a computer repair shop in Delaware, where the computer was taken in April 2019 but was never picked up. The computer contained a wealth of juicy images and video footage of Hunter Biden's drug addiction and his romps with prostitutes. The material was highly embarrassing, blatantly illegal in many cases, but not the most important thing on the computer's hard drive. The article focused on Hunter Biden's business dealings and on the role his father, Joe Biden, in those, while serving as the Vice-President under Barack Obama. It showed that Joe Biden had lied when he had claimed that he had never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings. In fact, Hunter Biden's correspondence harvested from the hard drive of the computer showed that Joe Biden had met his son's so-called business partner, a representative of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, at Hunter Biden's instigation. Hunter Biden was also a member of Burisma's board of directors since 2014 and received a hefty monthly fee. Less than a year after the meeting with Burisma, Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian state to sack the prosecutor investigating suspected money laundering and tax fraud involving the same company, threatening to otherwise deprive Ukraine of a billion dollar loan guarantee.
Scandalous? It certainly was, but not for everyone. CNN, for example, called the NY Post article "dubious" a few days after it had been published.
The New York Times said it was an attempt by Trump allies to damage Biden campaign.
And swiftly, a public letter was published, signed by “more than 50 former senior intelligence officials”, which said that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”.
In fact, the story had nothing to do with Russia's operations, and in March 2022, the mainstream press - led by The New York Times and The Washington Post - acknowledged the authenticity of both the story and the material on the computer.
But what about Twitter in the middle of all this? The fact that the social media platform blocked the sharing of the same article was immediately noticed by users. The reason given by Twitter was that their rules do not allow the sharing of material obtained through computer hacking. However, this reason was not valid, as no one had hacked into Hunter Biden's laptop. An internal company discussion has now revealed that Twitter staff were well aware of this and admitted to themselves that such an explanation was problematic.
The real reason for the immediate move to prevent the story from spreading was that the authorities had long before informed Twitter of a need to prevent the story of Hunter Biden's laptop from spreading. The fact is that John Paul Mac Isaac, whose computer store the laptop ended up in in 2019, gave it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) already back then. It wasn't until August 2020, when having received no feedback from the FBI, he wrote to Giuliani, who gave the materials to the NY Post. At the time Giuliani was under FBI surveillance. This means, that the FBI had all the contents of the computer, but they did no investigate them. Instead, they informed a Twitter staffer who had regular meetings with authorities that an “hack and leak operation” by a foreign country was probably going to happen in October 2020 and it would involve Hunter Biden.
One can even say that the story was so highly anticipated that in September 2020, well before its publication, a “tabletop exercise” was held for media companies on how to deal with a leak about Hunter Biden. A Twitter employee attended.
Perhaps by the time the story broke, the authorities had already processed the social media companies to such an extent that the decision to block the story was just a matter of tinkering.
In retrospect, a Twitter founder and then chief executive of the company Jack Dorsey has admitted that the company's decision to block the sharing of the NY Post story on Hunter Biden was a mistake.
Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Joe Rogan that the FBI had been proactive in informing them of the Hunter Biden laptop story in exactly the same way, and that they too had restricted the story's distribution as a result.
Twitter's internal documents also reveal the company received money for processing requests from the FBI. In an email dated from February 2021, it is acknowledged that they have received $3.4 million since October 2019.
What to take from all this?
There are, of course, more issues with Twitter Files, as noted by the journalists that have worked on them; all in all, we’re seeing a worrisome picture: a number of facts have been exposed on how our freedom of expression and the free flow of information has been restricted at that platform, but even though these facts have been published and are now public, the matter is often still dealt with as if being a question of political allegiance and not that of our freedom of expression and opinion. At the said congressional sitting of March 9th, the political polarisation was highly visible. While the Republican members of the Congress wanted to discuss the matter and clarify it with further questions, the Democrats, on the contrary, blamed Musk and the journalists who testified at the hearing for making trouble, and instead of discussing the issue, engaged in trivialising it.
Democratic member of the House of Representatives, Stacey E. Plaskett, argued that, in fact, the Twitter files embody merely "a discussion on content moderation and that we only got a fraction of that discussion”. She called the journalists Taibbi and Shellenberger Musk's "public scribes” and "so-called journalists" who selectively report on the material handed to them by Musk and therefore publish the Republican-friendly narrative chosen by Musk himself, which among other goals, serves the billionaire-businessman's economic interests.
Another Democrat, Colin Allred, addressed the reporters by saying, "It maybe possible, if you can take off the tin foil hat, that there is not a vast conspiracy, but ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way, to make sure that our online discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy undermined."
These words are probably a good summary of the views on the issue at hand by one side of the society – the one that includes a large number of politicians who call themselves liberals, as well as their kindred journalists and opinion leaders. What is behind their attitude? Why do they take this attitude? Are they ignorant of the facts, or is it that when censorship is used to remove political opponents and views they personally disagree with, that censorship is tolerated, perhaps even encouraged? For in actuality the facts now brought to light render it impossible to take the words of Allred seriously.
Any support for the censorship of one’s opponents feels negligent to the fact that by such act one is also supporting the censorship of oneself, as sooner or later it will turn back on the censor himself. Is this still comprehensible or is it getting too complicated to understand?