(2022-12-12) The Twitter Files Is What It Claims To Expose

The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose.Twitter is not what it seems. The social media platform poses as a neutral marketplace for the exchange of ideas and information...But it is actually a tool of progressive power. That’s the story that conservatives want to tell about what Twitter used to be, in the bad old days before Elon Musk begrudgingly bought it.

Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents

Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole.

the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.

The first installment of the Twitter Files concerned the social media platform’s suppression of an October 2020 New York Post article about emails ostensibly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that had employed Hunter Biden

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice president

the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from Hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general, so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny. The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing.

It is true that, as vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky

On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it, out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe

Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials

Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were nonconsensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ended its suppression of the New York Post story after only one day.

nothing in Taibbi’s reporting indicated that Twitter had suppressed the Post story at the request of the Biden campaign, let alone of government officials

The second installment of the Twitter Files had a bit more substance than the first. But like its predecessor, it affirmed conservative narratives of persecution by omitting key pieces of context, while also including one outright lie.

Bari Weiss’s exposé sought to illuminate Twitter’s policy of secretly reducing the reach of certain accounts and tweets.

Twitter has made no secret of the fact that it punishes accounts by limiting their visibility

Twitter also listed “Limiting Tweet visibility” as an enforcement option under the company’s terms of service, writing,

Nevertheless, after reporting that the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had been put on a “Do not amplify” list, Weiss bizarrely claimed that Twitter had long “denied that it does such things.”

Weiss wrote, “In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban,’”

in their blog post, they wrote, “The best definition [of shadow ban] we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” And Twitter does not in fact “shadow ban” in that sense of the term.

She notes that “Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children” was placed on “a ‘Trends Blacklist,’

Weiss implies that Bhattacharya was placed on this list because he criticized COVID lockdowns. But she doesn’t actually assert that, or provide any direct evidence for it.

Weiss provides no information about why Twitter blacklisted either account. (It’s worth noting that whatever Twitter did to these accounts’ visibility, it was not very draconian, as both remain incredibly popular, and boast millions of followers

Weiss suggests that these blacklists disproportionately harmed conservatives. But she doesn’t actually provide any information about the ideological breakdown of blacklisted accounts

In 2021, Twitter conducted a study of its algorithm’s political implications. Examining data from seven different countries

It found that in six of seven nations, including the United States, the algorithm amplified rightwing politicians and news organizations far more than leftwing ones

The Twitter Files provide limited evidence that the social media platform’s former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. The project offers overwhelming evidence that Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation.