Over the past two weeks, a group of writers chosen by Elon Musk to review Twitter’s previously confidential internal messages have painted a picture in which a handful of unaccountable “trust and safety” executives made 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 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
But there’s a glaring irony at the project’s core that its authors never acknowledge. If a lack of transparency, accountability, or consistency in the processes by which tech giants make far-reaching content moderation decisions is cause for alarm — and it should be — then there is no more egregious example than the one Musk himself has set since buying Twitter for $44 billion in October.
This week alone, Musk — who billed himself as a “free-speech absolutist” —
permanently banned an account that had been tweeting public data about his private jet, creating a new, ad hoc policy to justify the move. Twitter then began suspending numerous other accounts, including that of rival social network Mastodon and
those of several journalists who had criticized the previous suspensions, all without immediate explanation.
As social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok have become dominant conduits of news and political debate, their role in shaping the contours of that debate has become contentious. Democratic leaders worry about how their algorithms may fuel extremism and conspiracy theories and call on them to rein in bigoted speech or viral falsehoods. Leading Republicans contend that they’re restricting Americans’ speech freedoms.
Both sides have
introduced legislation to curb these perceived wrongs, and two GOP-led states have passed sweeping regulations that will be
reviewed by the Supreme Court. Leaders from both parties are also pressuring the major platforms on whether to reinstate former president Donald Trump, as Musk recently did at Twitter, or to extend his suspension as he ramps up his next presidential run.
Twitter and other big social networks, including Facebook and YouTube,
have developed thick rulebooks and added sophisticated systems to detect violations of their speech policies. But ample reporting over the years has shown that their biggest decisions — like suspending Trump — often hinge on the
subjective calls of high-ranking executives.
At stake, in the broadest sense, is the role of social media in political discourse, and whether Silicon Valley tech firms can be trusted to fairly and judiciously wield their power over who gets heard in the modern public square.
Musk has said his purchase of Twitter, which is particularly influential among politicians and the media, was motivated by frustration with its policies and a desire to make it a haven for unfettered speech. He portrayed his decision to grant a handpicked group of writers special access to Twitter’s internal communication systems as a necessary reckoning with Twitter’s overly censorial past.
The writers include former New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss and onetime Rolling Stone scribe Matt Taibbi, both of whom now write their own newsletters on Substack and have emerged as influential critics of the left and the mainstream media. With Musk’s backing, they’ve framed the files as part of broader narrative that tech giants are systematically “censoring” conservative views.
Whether you find the Twitter files a bombshell or a “nothingburger” probably depends on how much you already knew about the messy, often subjective work of online content moderation — and whether you were predisposed to see a political conspiracy at work in the documents.
There are a handful of interesting new details that should trouble right and left alike. Taibbi found that Twitter’s top content moderators were
meeting on a weekly basis with multiple federal government agencies during the 2020 presidential campaign, whom they considered “partners” in flagging election misinformation for removal. That could raise First Amendment concerns, not to mention avenues for potential meddling in elections by the incumbent administration (in this case, the Trump administration).
Weiss devoted a thread to a series of moderation tools that Twitter called “visibility filtering” and
critics dubbed “shadowbanning,” in which the company blocked some users’ tweets from appearing in search results or recommendations without telling them. While these tools’ existence
was public, previously unpublished screenshots showed that company executives had more fine-grained controls at their disposal than they had acknowledged.
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