Dec.16

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It's a Conspiracy!, Part II: The "Twitter Files"

On Wednesday, we had an item discussing Hunter Biden's laptop, and our assessment of the story (executive summary: We are inclined to believe the laptop, and the data on it, belong to Hunter Biden, but we don't believe that there is anything that demonstrates corrupt behavior by Joe Biden). We promised to follow up with a piece on the so-called "Twitter Files" on Thursday, since there is a definitely connection between the two stories. However, we actually meant "Friday." Sometimes it's easy to mix up "the day on which the material is written" and "the day on which the material is published."

Anyhow, Friday has arrived, and so now it's time to take a look at this alleged scandal. And where you have to start, in our view, is with three giant red flags:

1. Elon Musk: Given Musk's skill at, and demonstrated history of, bending the narrative to suit his purposes, you have to treat anything he's involved in with kid gloves. That is especially true here. The story that the Twitter Files purport to tell is that under the site's past regime, Twitter was hopelessly biased against conservatives. There is also an implication that Twitter is representative of other social media platforms, which are therefore also hopelessly biased against conservatives.
   
   The problem here, in terms of red flags, is that Musk has at least two motivations to sell this particular narrative. The first of those is that, for whatever reason, he has recently reinvented himself as a right-wing culture warrior, doing battle with the forces of wokeness. The second is that he's trying to attract right-wing users, most obviously Donald Trump, back to his money-hemorrhaging social media platform. If The Daily Beast were to start publishing stories about how left-wing websites are our single-best tool for combating global warming, it would be wise to treat those stories with some skepticism. The same holds here.
   
   
2. Selective Release: Musk, and several members of his management team, are choosing what is released to the general public (mostly internal e-mails and online Slack conversations involving Twitter employees). For serious journalistic outlets, this curation alone is enough to be a dealbreaker. It means two important things: (1) that there's no way to be certain of the context surrounding the communications, and (2) that there's no way to know how often similar situations arose involving left-wing and/or politically neutral content. It is one thing if 95% of the moderation discussions and decisions involved right-leaning content. It's another thing if it was only 50%, or 40% or 30%.
   
   
3. Selective Recipients: Musk is only releasing the Twitter Files to select people in the media. In fact, there are only three folks who are on the Twitter CEO's recipient list: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger. This is a very, very carefully chosen list. All three of these individuals have cultivated a reputation for being "independent" but willing to ask "tough questions" about wokeness and about people on the left. Shellenberger, for example, has argued that progressivism encourages homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Weiss is fond of comparing left wingers and fascists. Taibbi is an enthusiastic practitioner of bothsidesism; his main shtick is that the excesses of the left and of the right are equally wrongheaded and are entirely comparable to each other. For example, he's compared people who look through the past statements of public figures with an eye towards racist rhetoric to "Christians [who] periodically discover the face of Jesus in tree stumps or wall mold."
   
   In short, Musk did not handpick Fox or The New York Post to share his material with. No, to create a veneer of legitimacy, he picked people who are not necessarily in the bag for the Republican Party the way Fox is, but who agree with the right on a lot of things, and who just so happen to agree with Musk on the key issues in play here. So, he knew exactly what would be written even before he shared a single screen shot with Taibbi, Weiss and Shellenberger. And even then, Musk demanded additional concessions from the trio. One of those was that they had to publish everything they wrote to Twitter first, before publishing it elsewhere. It's not known what the other concessions were; Taibbi has publicly acknowledged that "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions," but has refused to expand on what those conditions were.

In short, one cannot take this seriously as an attempt to inform the public and to stimulate thought and discussion. This is much closer to a propaganda campaign than it is to serious journalism.

With that said, here are the three major "stories" that these writers have told so far (again, in service of the larger storyline that Twitter is biased against conservatives):

1. The Biden Laptop: Hunter Biden's laptop was the subject of the first wave of revelations, and most of the Twitter Files coverage has been about this issue. What the releases show is that the Twitter staff initially suppressed coverage of the laptop story in general, and of The New York Post's reporting in particular. Their reasoning for doing so was that the story was based on hacked data, and Twitter's policies forbade the propagation of such stories (as the platform does not wish to encourage hacking, for obvious reasons).
   
   With the benefit of hindsight, it's fairly clear that Twitter made two mistakes here. The first was the general policy; there is a fair bit of legitimate news based on hacked or otherwise pilfered information, and a blanket ban on such reporting is problematic. The second is that the laptop data wasn't hacked. As we noted in the previous item, linked above, the data was copied from a laptop that computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac appears to have acquired legitimately.
   
   It is entirely plausible that, if the laptop had belonged to right-wing figure, the generally left-leaning Twitter staff might have handled things differently. That can never be known, but it does raise the possibility of at least a little bit of left-wing bias, at least in this particular case. That said, there are two things to be said in the Twitter staff's defense. The first was that when they were grappling with this particular issue, all of the prominent data leaks in recent memory (e.g. the DNC e-mails) actually were the result of hacking. So, their premature conclusion here was understandable, even if it was incorrect. The second is that the decision to suppress the story was in place for... 1 day. So, there is no basis for saying that Twitter (which is not the only social media platform, and which is used by only 5% of Americans on any given day) somehow changed the landscape of the 2020 election with its heavy-handed, pro-left-wing content moderation. Because it didn't.
   
   
2. The Trump Suspension: This was the subject of the second wave of releases. Everyone knows the decision that the Twitter staff reached (and that Musk ultimately reversed). And the debate that the staff had is exactly the same sort of debate that might have taken place in this site's Sunday mailbag. On one hand, politicians and world leaders are given much broader latitude on social media and other platforms than are private citizens, and Twitter had never before banned a sitting world leader from its platform. On the other hand, Trump tweeted things that most certainly fanned the flames, and that might well be said to have helped cause much violence and multiple deaths. Ultimately, every other social media platform reached the same conclusion that Twitter did and banned Trump. So, it's hard to find much fault here. In fact, it's hard to find any.
   
   
3. COVID-19: The current wave of releases has to do with efforts to curb COVID misinformation, often with direct input from the Biden administration. To take one example, Stanford School of Medicine professor Jay Bhattacharya was "blacklisted" on the day he joined the platform. That meant that he was still able to log in, to tweet, to add followers and to engage with users but that his tweets would not show up in "trending topics" searches. In other words, if you asked Twitter to show you the latest tweets about COVID, his stuff wouldn't appear. The reason he was blacklisted is that he and two of his colleagues released what they call the "Great Barrington Declaration," a letter that argued that only very vulnerable people should be locked down and that everyone else should resume their normal lives with an eye toward contracting COVID and developing herd immunity. This is not insane in the way that "inject bleach to cure COVID" is, but it did and does run contrary to generally accepted wisdom on COVID. And indeed, what we know now that was not fully clear when Bhattacharya and his fellows issued that declaration is that having COVID does not convey full immunity against the disease, and it's most certainly possible to contract it again (and again and again).
   
   Maybe Bhattacharya should not have been blacklisted. Maybe he should have. However, this is another case where context matters a lot. When Bhattacharya joined the platform back in 2020, much about COVID was unknown and Americans were dying at the rate of thousands a day. Further, the people moderating content at Twitter are not physicians and are certainly not immunologists or microbiologists. Under the circumstances, it is understandable that they erred on the side of being heavy-handed.

In the end, the Twitter Files raise some questions about which reasonable people can disagree. Should a sitting presidential administration be asking a social media platform to moderate content in the name of public health? Should Donald Trump have been banned in response to the events of 1/6? Should non-scientists be making decisions about science-based content? Should anyone from Stanford be allowed to tweet, ever?

Also, the Twitter Files might support, very weakly, the notion that the folks who ran Twitter had a left-wing bias, and that the left-wing bias sometimes affected the choices they made. That said, it's hard to know how pernicious this problem really was, given the selectivity of what Elon Musk is releasing. It's also worth noting that while moderation decisions might favor left-wingers, Twitter's automated algorithms, the ones that decide which content to promote, actually favor conservatives. The reason is simple: Conservative tweets are much more likely to contain misinformation, misinformation is much more likely to get engagement from users, and high-engagement tweets get promoted over low-engagement tweets.

The lesson the Twitter Files really support, however, is that content moderation is really difficult. And the folks who used to run Twitter, who were trying to figure out how to handle the situation on the fly, while being attacked from partisans on both the left and the right, clearly spent much time where they were in over their heads. And don't forget that the staff was not only trying to do what was right, as they saw it, they were also keeping in mind their business partners and the possibility that the government might swoop in and start regulating them. Not an easy situation.

Finally, we will conclude with this: In the end, the Twitter Files didn't reveal anything that we didn't already know. Oh, the stuff shared by Musk might have filled in the picture a little bit, but there is nothing we've written here about how Twitter operates that couldn't have been written six months ago. As with the Biden laptop story, folks on the right are carping about how this story is being buried by the "lamestream media." But it's gotten some coverage, and the fact that it hasn't gotten more is due to the red flags we outline above, as well as the fact that there just isn't much "news" here. Further, as with the Biden situation, we assume the political actors here (i.e., Musk) would have made sure to release the most damning stuff first. So, it is likely that the Twitter Files will continue to fade from public view, excepting those for whom the coverage serves as a form of confirmation bias.

Incidentally, it's been suggested by several readers that we should write items like this on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. If we did that, we'd envision putting conspiracy theories, right- and left-wing talking points, historical claims and other such material under the microscope. Does this sound like a good idea? If so, what would be a good recurring title that covers all those possibilities? And also, if so, are there any subjects in particular you would like us to look at? If you have thoughts, let us know. (Z)