'Twitter Files' explained, and what they revealed about tech censorship

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The “Twitter Files” have rocked the world of U.S. politics, media and Big Tech and media, and to some people vindicated the belief that Silicon Valley has been manipulating information for political ends.

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The National Post’s Bryan Passifiume provides a rundown of what we’ve learned so far, and the aftermath for Twitter and owner Elon Musk.

What are the Twitter Files?

After multi-billionaire Musk bought Twitter, he promised he would lift the corporate veil on ideologically motivated censorship perpetrated by the social media platform’s previous management.

The most anticipated documents, released this month to three handpicked journalists, chronicled Slack messages and emails between company officials that centred on the suppression of an explosive news story on the eve of the U.S. presidential election that could have been damaging to Joe Biden. They also exposed discussions around the company’s decision in 2021 to ban the Twitter account of then president Donald Trump.

What did the Twitter Files tell us?

The dump of internal communications was seen by many as vindication for those who claim Twitter’s content moderation policies are unfairly biased against conservatives.

Posted in a Dec. 2 Twitter thread, journalist Matt Taibbi described the first installment of the “Twitter Files” as an “incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms,” calling it a “Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.”

While content moderation purportedly began as a way to combat spam and fraudsters on Twitter, Taibbi alleges it grew into a means for famous and powerful users to request management remove content they didn’t like.

“Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well,” Taibbi wrote.

“First a little, then more often, then constantly.”

A redacted screenshot of an Oct. 24, 2020 email between two Twitter executives included a list of URLs of tweets allegedly flagged by “the Biden team” for “review.”

A reply to this email consisted of two words: “handled these.”

While this service was allegedly open to both Republicans and Democrats leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Taibbi said the system wasn’t balanced.

“Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” Taibbi tweeted.

What did the Twitter Files reveal about the Hunter Biden laptop story?

While conservatives had long complained that Twitter had been suppressing right-wing voices, the company’s politically-influenced content moderation policies were exposed after a bombshell New York Post story based on emails found on a laptop owned by U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The computer had been abandoned at a Delaware repair shop the previous April and the shop’s owner provided it to the New York Post. The laptop linked Biden, who was running for president, to foreign influence-peddling being done by his son Hunter and brother Jim. Twitter tried blocking the story from being tweeted and shared (Facebook then followed suit).

“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe’,” Taibbi tweeted.

“They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”

The New York Post, White House spokesperson Kaleigh McEnany and reporters, including at this newspaper, found themselves suspended from Twitter for posting links to the story.

Subsequent emails posted by Taibbi show executives struggling to understand their own policy.

“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe, and I think the best expalinabilty argument for this externally would be that we’re waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials,” wrote Twitter manager Trenton Kennedy.

“We’ll face hard questions on this if we didn’t have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.”

Twitter’s in-house counsel Jim Baker — whom Musk fired earlier this week — wrote it was “reasonable for us to assume that (Hunter Biden’s laptop) may have been (hacked) and that caution is warranted.”

What did the Twitter Files say about banning Donald Trump’s account?

A second document dump by Taibbi a week after the first concerned the banning of Trump’s account, which occurred two days after the infamous Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.

Taibbi wrote that while much of Twitter’s internal debate on banning the then president took place between Jan. 6 and 8, the framework for that decision had been in place for some time.

Screenshots of Slack conversations seem to show a culture of on-the-fly decisions to ban content and users, often with little oversight or context.

“During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content,” Taibbi wrote, in later tweets revealing reports of false tweets even being reported to executives from the FBI.

“Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally,” Taibbi tweeted.

“We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.”

By the morning of Jan. 8, internal Twitter communications show that they had given Trump one more “strike” left before being permanently removed from the service, reported journalist Bari Weiss, who was also granted access to the files, along with Taibbi.

“For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate,” Weiss wrote.

The events of Jan. 6 put both internal and external pressure on Twitter executives to take action, Weiss wrote — showing screenshots of Slack conversations depicting many in the company were upset the ban hadn’t happened earlier.

What has been the aftermath?

Musk has fired a lot of people at Twitter, including those implicated by the Twitter files. And Conservatives have held it up as proof that Big Tech is censoring speech in America.

But Daniel Tsai, a lecturer in business, law, technology, and culture at the University of Toronto, told the National Post he thinks the Twitter files landed with a bit of a thud.

“I think Musk is doing it for his own therapy,” he said.

“He’s trying to get validation that he made a bad deal and was misled into buying a terrible company — a poorly-performing company that didn’t have the subscriber base he was told it would have.”

Musk had claimed, before buying Twitter, that their user numbers were vastly inflated by non-human, automated bot accounts.

He has reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, and offered “amnesty” to scores of other accounts that had been banned by Twitter for reasons other than fraud or spamming.

But Musk is now facing accusations that he’s already begun practicing what he preached against, using Twitter to ban accounts he disapproves of.

Last month, he temporarily suspended comedienne Kathy Griffin for satirically impersonating him.

This week, he used his self-proclaimed war on “Twitter bots” to suspend University of Central Florida Sophomore Jack Sweeney.

For years Sweeney has, much to Musk’s dismay, operated @elonjet, an automated Twitter account that keeps track of the location of Musk’s private jet.

Despite Musk’s Nov. 6 assurance that Sweeney would still be permitted to use the platform, Twitter banned all of his accounts on Thursday, including one that tracked the locations of Canadian government VIP aircraft that Sweeney operated with Canadian researcher Steffan Watkins.

That was followed by Thursday’s banning of several prominent American journalists who had been critically covering Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Musk claimed they had posted tweets revealing the home addresses of him and his families, but the journalists and their publishers deny it.

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