Over the past two weeks, a group of writers chosen by Elon Musk to review Twitter’s previously confidential internal messages has portrayed a handful of unaccountable “trust and safety” executives as making critical decisions about online political speech based partly on their own left-leaning intuitions. The “Twitter files” show the company’s former leaders, pre-Musk, at times changing or reinterpreting the company’s rules on the fly as they scrambled to react to election misinformation, covid-19 skepticism and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.