My phone instantly blew up with wisecracks. So we kept going.Ībout two weeks into the #TwitterFiles project, the company suspended the accounts of CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, VOA’s Steve Herman, and a few other social media personalities like Aaron Rupar, reportedly for sharing information about the movement of Elon Musk’s private jet. Still, there was no question this was in the public interest. Among other things this looked more like a cartel than a competitive media landscape, and I had an uneasy feeling early on that publicizing this arrangement might create a host of unanticipated problems for everyone involved. A communications highway had been built linking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a slew of other platforms. The content-policing system was more elaborate and organized than any of us imagined. When we got into the Files, we were caught off guard. Just one possible recommendation made headlines, let alone regimes of spreadsheet requests. Also, the notion that there’d been any contact at all between the FBI and a company like Facebook ahead of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a national scandal after Mark Zuckerberg blurted out something along those lines to Joe Rogan. Remember, in the pre-Twitter Files world, Twitter was still denying that it shadow-banned people at all (“We do not,” they’d explained ). I went into the project expecting to answer a few narrow questions, maybe about how internal content moderation worked, or if federal law enforcement made an inappropriate call or two to discourage high-profile stories. Within a few days of seeing documents it was clear we were looking at something bigger than us, Musk, or Twitter, more or less completely obviating the motivation question as far as I was concerned. I asked the question, but I can’t say I ever fully understood the answer. Normally when someone comes to you with a story you ask what it is they want or expect out of press coverage, both so you can understand their motives and to avoid misunderstandings later on. To this day I think he did something incredibly important by opening up these communications for the public. Moreover the decision to release the company’s dirty laundry for the world to see was a potentially historic act. He talked about wanting to restore transparency, but also seemed to think his purchase was funny, which I also did (spending $44 billion with a laugh as even a partial motive was hard not to admire). His distaste for the blue-check thought police who’d spent more than a half-year working themselves into hysterics at the thought of him buying Twitter - which had become the private playground of entitled mainstream journalists - appeared rooted in more than just personal animus. I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter, but I actually liked Musk. This was the context under which I met Musk and the circle of adjutants who would become the go-betweens delivering the material that came to be known as the Twitter Files. With critics this obnoxious, even a step in the direction of free speech values would likely win back audiences that saw the platform as a humorless garrison of authoritarian attitudes. This was an obvious moral panic and the very real consternation at papers like the Washington Post and sites like Slate over these issues seemed to offer the new owners of Twitter a huge opening. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, going to war against a satire site was like dressing up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. I didn’t have to know any of the particulars of the intramural Twitter dispute to think anyone who wanted to censor the Babylon Bee was crazy. ” The Post story was about the “troubling” decision to re-instate the Babylon Bee, and numerous stories like it implied the world would end if this “‘free speech’ agenda” was imposed. From the Guardian last November: “Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy.” From the Washington Post : “ Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda dismantles safety work at Twitter, insiders say. how much on Twitter was real traffic and how much was spam), said he was “obviously overpaying,” and insisted he was an advocate of the right “to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” New owner Elon Musk accused the old regime of lying about the percentage of Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU) on the platform (i.e. A small group of other journalists and writers soon jumped down the rabbit hole to join the one-in-a-million search.Īt the time the company was just completing a contentious sale, which featured multiple stops, starts and legal actions, along with competing furious public relations campaigns. Nearly five months ago I was presented with a rare opportunity, to look through internal correspondence at Twitter.
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