As some have expected, billionaire Elon Musk taking ownership of Twitter has yielded results that are worthy of note.
According to reports, the Twitter CEO has distributed internal company records and documents to demonstrate how his predecessors at Twitter engaged in methods of censorship.
Musk began by showing the data to Substack journalist Matt Taibbi, who published a lengthy Twitter thread exposing how former leadership at the social network decided to stifle discussion of the New York Post's story detailing the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
The first installment of the "Twitter files," as they are called, revealed that Twitter colluded with the FBI and with Democrats to censor Republicans and stifle conservative voices ahead of key elections and during critical periods, including during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disclosures also showed that James Baker, a former general counsel at the FBI and a notable figure in the Trump-Russia investigation, advised Twitter executives to assert without evidence that the New York Post broke Twitter rules.
On December 6, 2022, Musk said Baker was “exited” from the company "in light of concerns about Baker's possible role in the suppression of information important to the public dialogue."
As detailed by Taibbi, “Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.” He added that, "By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: 'Handled.'"
Because the Hunter Biden scandal was suppressed by Big Tech and the mainstream media three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, it is believed by some that Twitter’s decision was sufficient to sway the election in favor of Joe Biden. As nimble minds will recall, the move was not heralded as “election interference” at the time, but was instead branded as “civic integrity.”
The second installment of the Twitter Files has shown how the social network maintained secret blacklists. Indeed, former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss would tweet how Twitter has limited the distribution and recommendation of tweets.
In 2018, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified under oath before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and stated that the social media network never censored conservative voices or issued shadowbans. “’I want to read a few quotes about Twitter’s practices and I just want you to tell me if they’re true or not,’ Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., said,” recounted an article from the New York Post. “’Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?’ ‘No,’ Dorsey responded. ‘Are you censoring people?’ Doyle followed. ‘No,’ Dorsey answered again. ‘Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans… is that true?’ Doyle followed. ‘No,’ Dorsey a third time.”
The same year, Twitter's former Legal, Policy, and Trust & Safety Head and Product Lead Vijaya Gadde wrote a blog post titled "Setting the record straight on shadow banning,” in which she said, “We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow... And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."
According to the second set of disclosures, the occurrences of shadowbanning were simply referred to by some within the company as “visibility filtering.” As detailed by a senior Twitter employee to Weiss, “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful too.” Additionally, three former Twitter employees told Weiss, “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do."
In part seven of the Twitter Files, journalist Michael Shellenberger revealed how the FBI and intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after it was published by the New York Post.
This installment, as put by journalist Matt Taibbi in a Twitter thread, proves that the FBI was so involved at Twitter, it was acting as a “subsidiary” of the platform. “The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content,” he said, adding that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”
Taibbi also said, “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds,” further noting that, “Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.”
This is important to note, some have maintained, because there is now evidence to corroborate the claims of what has long been dubbed “conspiracy theory,” that Big Tech and others have moved in coordination to suppress certain voices and viewpoints.
But the assertion that there has been no evidence before the Twitter Files to demonstrate Twitter’s proclivity for thought control is not exactly accurate.
In an August, 2018, interview, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the tech company employs much more left-leaning employees than conservatives, while also saying that social media in general has a “left-leaning” bias. “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” noted Dorsey, in an interview with New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen on the Recode website. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.” A month later, Dorsey told Congress that “political ideology” did not factor into the company’s policies.
One undercover Project Veritas video investigation showed current and former Twitter employees caught on camera explaining steps the social media platform took to censor political content they disagreed with. It was on January 3, 2018, at a San Francisco, California restaurant, where Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Twitter Software Engineer explained the technique: “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
As detailed by Twitter Software Engineer Steven Pierre, “Every single conversation is going to be rated by a machine and the machine is going to say whether or not it’s a positive thing or a negative thing.”
One Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team divulged at a Twitter holiday party on December 15, 2017, that, “Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the sh**** people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.” And when former Twitter Engineer Conrado Miranda was asked if censorship capabilities exist to censor pro-Trump individuals, Miranda responded, “that’s a thing.”
According to former Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Norai, “There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.” As Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe put matters, “What kind of world do we live in where computer engineers are the gatekeepers of the ‘way people talk?’ This investigation brings forth information of profound public importance that educates people about how free they really are to express their views online.”
Rumors several years ago that Twitter began “shadowbanning” politically inconvenient users was confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke to Breitbart. It was revealed that Twitter maintained a “whitelist” of favored accounts and a “blacklist” of unfavored accounts; whitelist accounts are prioritized in search results, even if they are not popular among users, while accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and the timelines of other users.
The source that Breitbart obtained, and whose claims were corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher, described the social network’s actions as “deliberate,” adding that he was “afraid of the site’s power,” while further noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.
In November, 2018, Iraq War veteran and former Republican congressional candidate Jesse Kelly was banned from Twitter for unclear reasons. It was also reported that Twitter has blocked the Center for Immigration Studies from promoting any tweets with the term “illegal alien,” words claimed by the social network as constituting hateful content. On February 11, 2019, Canadian writer Meghan Murphy sued Twitter, in which she claimed they unfairly banned her because of her criticism of transgender rights. In June, 2020, comedian Graham Linehan was permanently suspended from Twitter for, in the words of a Twitter spokesperson to CNN, “repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation.”
In early January, 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had her personal Twitter account permanently suspended for spreading Covid-19 misinformation. Afterwards, Greene responded to Twitter’s decision on the conservative social media platform GETTR, in which she said, “When Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, Kamala and Ilhan can bail out rioters on Twitter, and Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS statistics, Twitter is an enemy to America and can't handle the truth. That's fine, I'll show America we don't need them and it's time to defeat our enemies."
One study by Media Research Center’s News Busters tracked a staggering 808 cases of Big Tech platforms restricting speech, deleting content and banning individuals over content dealing with the virus between March 17, 2020 and February 3, 2022. The platforms “include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, TikTok and YouTube,” detailed the media watchdog group. “The platforms restricted anyone from skeptical epidemiologists to curious scientists to working journalists to concerned lawmakers speaking to constituents. Those individuals and organizations censored include some of the most prominent influencers on social media: Podcaster Joe Rogan, conservative radio hosts Dan Bongino and Mark Levin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson and news organizations from Fox News to Reason magazine. Even prominent academic journals like the British Medical Journal.”
In January, 2018, Project Veritas filmed Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitting to banning accounts expressing what some see as unconventional interests. “Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” detailed Singh. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.” He added, “You just delete them, but, like, the problem is there are hundreds of thousands of them, so you’ve got to, like, write algorithms that do it for you.”
As observed by Donald Trump Jr., in a 2019 opinion piece for The Hill, “From ‘shadowbans’ on Facebook and Twitter, to demonetization of YouTube videos, to pulled ads for Republican candidates at the critical junctures of election campaigns, the list of violations against the online practices and speech of conservatives is long. I certainly had my suspicions confirmed when Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, ‘accidentally’ censored a post I made regarding the Jussie Smollett hoax, which consequently led to me hearing from hundreds of my followers about how they’ve been having problems seeing, liking or being able to interact with my posts. Many of them even claimed that they’ve had to repeatedly refollow me, as Instagram keeps unfollowing me on their accounts. While nothing about Big Tech’s censorship of conservatives truly surprises me anymore, it’s still chilling to see the proof for yourself. If it can happen to me, the son of the president, with millions of followers on social media, just think about how bad it must be for conservatives with smaller followings and those who don’t have the soapbox or media reach to push back when they’re being targeted?”
On November 29, 2021, Jack Dorsey stepped down from his long-standing position as Twitter CEO. In his resignation letter, which he e-mailed and tweeted, you will find that his apparent one wish amid the commotion was “for Twitter Inc to be the most transparent company in the world.”
An interesting aspiration for a key player within the technological sector and supposedly “social” industry, whose collective actions have historically (and now verifiably) amounted to the antitheses of transparency. How Twitter is to go about becoming the most transparent company in the world, Dorsey did not say.
At any rate, it may be best to just let Musk do the talking.