“On the morning of January 8 [2021], President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.”So begins the latest extended thread of the so-called Twitter Files, this time posted by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, who like Matt Taibbi and another journalist have been given unfettered access to a trove of internal Twitter documents by its new billionaire owner, Elon Musk. “The Removal of Trump from Twitter” is the fifth such thread that has resulted from some unlikely tag team coverage of Twitter’s shadow banning practices. Exactly how personally engaged Mr. Musk is with the firestorm of new disclosures about Twitter’s obstruction of free expression by some of its users is not clear.The jury is still out on whether the more politically tinged, so-called Twitter Files will enhance or further erode Mr. Musk’s popularity. But the slow drip of internal documents to which Mr. Musk has given unfettered access to the trio of journalists shows that he will not shy away from breaking the rules. The reports in question are not trivial. On Monday, Ms. Weiss reported that “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.”After January 6, Ms. Weiss reports, employees of the company began agitating internally for the president’s removal. Many expressed dismay that it had not done so earlier. Other world leaders, however, got a free pass.The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted that Israel a “cancerous tumor” and called for its annihilation. A former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was a “right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.” The president of Nigeria directly incited violence against his political opponents. None of these accounts were banned, Ms. Weiss noted.Ms. Weiss reposted a screenshot revealing that there was internal dissent at Twitter about the decision to ban Mr. Trump. She said that on January 7, one Twitter employee stated that “Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” Such voices were a distinct minority at the company, she said.Mr. Taibbi had previously tweeted that he would help show “the erosion of standards” within Twitter in the months before January 6, 2021, as well as “decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.” The insinuation, borne out by succeeding tweets, is that at least one federal agency may, in connivance with Twitter executives, have flirted with election tampering. With respect to the banning of President Trump from the social media platform, Mr. Taibbi tweeted that “Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the ‘context surrounding’ actions by Trump and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last four-plus years.’” He wrote that “the bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days” — i.e. January 6 to January 8. He added that as “BariWeiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.”Mr. Taibbi tweeted, a bit breathlessly, that the banning Mr. Trump was an event that “Twitter’s employees understood in the moment” to be “a landmark moment in the annals of [free] speech.” Possibly. But should anybody really be surprised that a bloated San Francisco start-up would do anything other than reflexively instrumentalize its employees’ aversion to any politician who did not share or particularly care for their radical left agenda by shadow banning and blacklisting as they saw fit?How much of an impact the new Twitter Files will have on the national political process remains to be seen. But as The Atlantic astutely noted, right now they do “what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.”Under Mr. Musk’s stewardship Twitter has been shedding advertisers, including some big corporate ones apparently leery of upsetting the woke applecart. Even singer Elton John ditched the social network, tweeting on Friday night that he would be leaving Twitter “given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.” To that Musk might have replied, “I guess that’s why they call it the blues” and left it at that, but no: he assumed the tone of an oversolicitous customer service representative: “I love your music. Hope you come back. Is there any misinformation in particular that you’re concerned about?” he tweeted. The outreach to Mr. John was followed on Saturday by a continuation of the “Twitter Files” — but again, Mr. Musk enlisted a third party, the journalist Michael Shellenberger, to dispense a thread of new tweets entitled “The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7.” What will follow Monday’s Twitter Files was not immediately clear.Mr. Musk needs to keep Twitter alive, lucrative, and relevant. The torrent of new tweets that spring from his unique form of journalistic largesse demonstrates that under its previous management Twitter was not up to much worth cheering about in the arena of free speech. It also proves that billionaire or not, he will not be able to do all three of the aforementioned things alone.
