The Twitter Files Explained: Matt Taibbi on The Censorship Industrial Complex

 

by John V. Walsh 

Posted onMay 8, 2023

The Twitter Files are a set of internal Twitter documents that Elon Musk released to a group of journalists and other writers soon after his takeover of the company. Journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss organized the publication of the documents in a series of Twitter threads.

In this lecture (video below) Taibbi explains what the Files are and what their significance is. It is enlightening both for those who know little of the Files and for those who have closely followed the controversies surrounding them.

There are two aspects of the Twitter files that are striking.

First, the investigation into the Files shows federal agencies like the FBI systematically working with Twitter in the pre-Musk days to suppress information, using a variety of censoring techniques including shadow banning. (Shadow banning is best described as censorship which hides the tweets or decreases their circulation without their author knowing.) Since censorship by the federal government is forbidden by the First Amendment, this fact would seem to merit a full investigation and proper punishment for those who engaged in any illegalities. It has also emerged in the course of the investigations stimulated by the Files that federal agencies have exerted similar influence over other social media platforms such as Facebook.

Second, the Twitter Files have gained precious little attention in the mainstream media. Much of the mainstream coverage has been in the vein of, “Move along, there is nothing to see here.” Much of the rest has been devoted to attacks on Musk for daring to release the Files and motley other matters.

In this speech at the William F. Buckley Institute at Yale, Matt Taibbi describes the Twitter Files and what we know of them to date. Taibbi, a man of the “left” appears at the Institute bearing the name of one of the most prominent Cold War Conservatives, another example of so-called “right-left” collaboration that we see in response to the dangers of the moment.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2023/05/08/the-twitter-files-explained-matt-taibbi-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex/