The so-called Twitter files, which
were written by a group of
independent journalists, given
access to internal company
documents, offer a behind the scenes
glimpse at how the federal
government shaped the flow of
information on one of the world's
largest social media platforms.
Whether or not the Twitter files
contain information that was
surprising to those already aware
of the thousands of takedown
requests the company receives every
month from law enforcement agencies
and the courts, or of the immense
challenges of content moderation
is beside the point.
Twitter files have brought important
new information to light.
They show that the company stifled
debate over important policy issues
by shadow banning certain accounts
for no good reason and then
misleading the public about it.
They show that Twitter was routinely
strongarmed by the White House and
the FBI into complying
with frivolous takedown requests,
and they provide evidence
that the intelligence community
likely influenced the decision
to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop
story in the lead up to the 2020
election.
I mean, to be totally frank,
almost every conspiracy theory that
people had about Twitter turned out
to be true.
So
is there a conspiracy theory about
Twitter that didn't turn out to be
true?
Conspiracy theorists are often
sloppy with the facts and exaggerate
what really happened.
But the information brought to light
by the Twitter files should be
alarming to anyone who cares about
free speech and a free society.
Government meddling in similar ways
on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
and Google Search.
How can we prevent the Internet from
turning into a centralized apparatus
through which state actors can shape
and censor public debate?
Here are three major takeaways
from the Twitter files.
One: twitter distorted
the conversation and misled the
public. Twitter had a system of
white lists and blacklists
that allowed its algorithms and
human moderators to turn
engagement dials up and down
based on their users.
It used this power to limit the
ability of certain groups and
individuals to reach an audience,
including conservative commentator
Dan Bongino, Stanford economist
and medical school professor Jay
Battacharya,
MNRA vaccine critic Alex Berenson
and the Libs of TikTok.
When asked if Twitter Shadow bans,
then co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey
misled Congress.
Social media is being rigged to
censor conservatives.
Is that true of Twitter?
No.
Twitter Shadow Banning Prominent
Republicans.
Bad.
Is that true?
No.
The company sought to cover by tapdancing around
the meaning of the word.
In a 2018 blog post, Twitter's
trust and Safety team wrote
"We do not shadow ban.
We were always able to see the
tweets with no follow.
Although you may have to do more
work to find them, like go
directly to their profile."
Needless to say, making tweets
so hard to find.
Digging through someone's profile is
the only way to unearth them is
what's commonly known as shadow
banning, or as Twitter employees
termed it, with an Orwellian flair,
"visibility filtering." The Twitter
files show the company's staff
became increasingly comfortable
using these tools to manage
the flow of information and
political discourse around the 2020
election. Regularly deploying
filters to limit the visibility of
Trump's tweets and many others
pertaining to election results in
the weeks preceding the January 6
riot and the decision to evict
the president from the platform.
Yes, Twitter is a private company
and it has every right to label the
tweets of Harvard epidemiologist
Martin Kulldorf as misleading
when he tweets. Statements such as
"Thinking that everyone must be
vaccinated is a scientifically
flawed, is thinking that nobody
should." But Twitter is still worthy
of our condemnation,
Dr. Battacharya was shadow banned despite
being a respected epidemiologist
from a prestigious university, and
many of his warnings during the
pandemic turned out to be correct.
And you can acknowledge serious
problems with the work of former
New York Times reporter Alex
Berenson, who, for instance, badly
misinterpreted data to infer a spike
in vaccine caused mortality
while still believing it's
preferable to have a public airing
of controversial and deeply flawed
arguments.
A better way to deal with speech you
disagree with is to respond
to it, as Derek Thompson attempted
to do in the Atlantic when he
called Berenson "The Pandemic's
Wrongness Man." Ironically,
Twitter raised Berenson profile
by allowing him to inhabit the role
of the oppressed truth seeker.
Two: The government is secretly
policing speech.
The most troubling thing about the
Berenson De-platforming isn't
Twitter's decision per say,
but whether it made that decision
freely. Was it done at the behest
of the federal government?
The Twitter files provide
circumstantial evidence that the
White House played a role when the
Biden administration took over.
One of their first meeting requests
with Twitter executives was on
COVID, writes journalist David Zweig
in the Twitter files.
The focus was on anti-vaxxer
accounts, especially Alex
Berenson.
"The only pandemic we have is among
the unvaccinated
and that Americans are killing
people.".
Berenson was suspened hours
after Biden made those comments.
The leak also revealed that a series
of meetings took place last December
in which an angry Biden team
excoriated Twitter executives
because they were not satisfied
with its enforcement approach and
wanted Twitter to do more and to
deplatform several accounts.
In Twitter file six, Matt
Taibbi described Twitter as an FBI
subsidiary.
Agents from a dedicated task force
would regularly send lists of
accounts, some with fewer than 1,000
followers, for Twitter to look at
for terms of service violations,
such as this left leaning account
jokingly telling Republicans to
vote a day late.
Former Twitter trust and safety head
Yoel Roth was in weekly
meetings with the FBI, Department of
Homeland Security, and the Office
of the Director of National
Intelligence.
In return for the company's work
handling FBI requests, Twitter
received $3.4 million
between October 2019 and early
2021.
Yes, complying with something in
the range of 8,000 requests would
have required significant resources
from Twitter.
And there's no reason the government
shouldn't have to pick up the tab.
But should this arrangement
really exist at all in a free
society given the mission creep
the Twitter files exposed?
Internal communications in the lead
up to Twitter's decision to stop a
blockbuster New York Post story
about the contents of Hunter Biden's
laptop from being shared
was also alarming.
Jim Baker, the former FBI
lawyer then working at Twitter,
leaned on Yoel Roth to treat the
laptop as the likely result
of a Russian hack and leak
operation. Despite little evidence
that claim the FBI
had told Roth to expect just such
a foreign operation to drop in
October and that Hunter Biden would
be a likely target.
A month before the laptop story
broke, Roth even participated
in a tabletop simulation at the
Aspen Institute about how
to handle a Hunter Biden data dump.
Publicly, 51 former
intelligence officials, including
James Clapper, Michael Hayden
and John Brennan, published a letter
claiming that the laptop has
all the classic earmarks of a
Russian information operation.
The New York Post story turned out
to be completely true.
With all that pressure coming from
supposedly reputable and
knowledgeable sources was Twitter
really acting independently when it
suppressed the story?
Giving the government unfettered
access to exert pressure behind the
scenes turned a forum for free
discussion with all of the
unavoidable messiness and
misinformation that free speech
entails into something much worse,
a state approved narrative
Generator.
Three: Twitter permitted
covert state propaganda on its
platform.
The U.S. ran sock puppet accounts on
Twitter and then may have tried to
shut them down secretly when it
looked like it was caught in the
act. After Trump won the 2016
election and Clinton blamed Russia
for her loss.
Congress began to focus intently
on the role of foreign
misinformation on the Internet.
Twitter began transparently labeling
accounts associated with any
government. Whether it be a
politician or a state run media
outlet. It also pledged to Congress
to rapidly identify and shut down
all state backed covert information
operations and deceptive propaganda.
But apparently that didn't always
extend to propaganda disseminated by
our own government.
As the Intercept's Lee Fang revealed
the US Central Command, CENTCOM
asked Twitter to white list a number
of Arab language accounts spreading
messages in support of the US
backed Yemen war so that
they would get the same special
treatment that verified accounts
received. Twitter complied.
One whitelisted account described
accurate U.S.
drone strikes that only hit
terrorists.
At first, the accounts had an
attached disclosure, noting that
they were linked to the US
government. But that disclosure was
eventually dropped from many
accounts and at least one
whitelisted government sock puppet
account used an AI generated image
as a profile picture.
An internal email thread shows
that the Department of Defense
wanted to meet with Twitter's legal
team in a secure facility.
One member of Twitter's team
speculated that the agency wanted
to classify its work with Twitter to
avoid embarrassment.
Baker suspected that the fake
accounts were set up using poor
tradecraft and that they wanted to
wind down the operation without
revealing accounts.
Connection to the DOD.
So what should Americans demand
of Congress in light of the Twitter
file revelations?
Lawmakers should rein in the FBI
and other executive agencies with
stricter reporting requirements
and defund any federal task force
whose mission includes fighting the
slippery concept of misinformation.
And yet, that will probably never
happen. The new omnibus bill just
increased the FBI funding.
Unfortunately, if a tool of
centralized speech control can be
abused by government, it's a virtual
certainty that it will be
abused eventually.
We should follow the advice of
Julian Assange and the Cypherpunk
movement that shaped his thinking,
which maintained that technology,
not government policy, is the only
effective check on authoritarian
tendencies in the long run.
You can't trust the government to
implement the policies that it says
it is implementing.
And so we must provide
the underlying tools, cryptographic
tools that we control
as a sort of use of force.
Good news is that many people are
gradually waking up to the
dangers of allowing a company to
maintain centralized control over
the public conversation.
After Trump's deplatforming, many
conservatives migrated to the
encrypted network Telegram
since Elon Musk's takeover of
Twitter. Many progressives have
joined the decentralized platform
Mastodon.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
has invested in the blockchain based
social media site Noster and
published an article calling for a
native Internet protocol for social
media, arguing that social media
must be resilient to corporate and
government control and moderation
is best implemented by algorithmic
choice.
And if Elon Musk wants to keep
Twitter relevant and competitive in
this continually fracturing
landscape and live up to his promise
of bringing more free speech to the
platform, he will have to take these
developments seriously and think
about ways that Twitter 2.0
can avoid the fate of its
predecessor by once again falling
victim to state interference.
He should aim to design a platform
that makes this kind of meddling
impossible so that we don't have
to trust any tech executive,
including Elon Musk, not
to censor speech on behalf of the
government.