From shock to anger to outrage: That describes my arc of reaction to “The Twitter Files,” especially Bari Weiss’s revelatory installment, #TwitterFiles2.
Using Twitter’s own internal files, released with the blessing of new owner Elon Musk, Weiss demonstrates that Twitter was indeed censoring conservatives, despite vigorous and repeated denials from company brass over the years.
“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-Pa.), asked the company’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey in a 2018 hearing. Bear in mind: Dorsey was under oath.
Doyle’s first quote: “Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?"
“No,” Dorsey responded.
“Are you censoring people?” Doyle asked next.
“No,” Dorsey answered.
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“Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans ... is that true?” Doyle followed.
“No,” Dorsey said.
Those may not have been lies in Dorsey’s mind. But they are deceptive, to say the least, when read in light of the Weiss revelations. Verified accounts of such prominent conservatives as activist Charlie Kirk (who like me hosts a radio show for Salem Media Group), radio host Dan Bongino and many others were flagged so that Twitter algorithms would not highlight their tweets.
Dorsey’s smoke screen masked other kinds of deception, too. Conservatives were led to believe that they had equal access to the Twitter audience. People and organizations on the right invested time, effort and sometimes money to craft messages in the belief that the results could be read on a level playing field. In truth, any message out of favor with Twitter management — or somehow offensive to lower-level content moderators — might find only a small fraction of its intended readership.
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The Twitter reporting has met with ferocious pushback, including on the app itself, in part because the company handpicked the journalists it wanted for the task: independent-minded iconoclasts Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Weiss. We don’t know what terms may have been imposed or agreements made with the company. So, sure, it’s fair to read with a radar for opinion and bias — as one should with all journalism. I would prefer it if Musk made every document available to everyone. Like his tweets.
But don’t let the attacks stop you from considering the reporting. Imagine the hours you would invest in preparing a lecture, a sermon or simply an advertisem*nt if you were told it might be heard by 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 people. Only after you have finished do you discover that your time has been wasted and you can never get it back, because your message was blocked or filtered.
Digital communication is still young. I understand that the promise sometimes exceeds the reality. Fans of the Cleveland Browns saw our NFL Sunday Ticket feeds crash two weeks in a row earlier this fall.
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That’s not what happened at Twitter. Producers of company-approved tweets enjoyed a fair shot at reaching the platform’s audience. Conservatives were singled out, secretly muffled, as Twitter robbed them of the one thing that cannot be made good: time.
Meanwhile, Twitter was happy to have the large crowds of followers some conservatives have built. These numbers helped Twitter hit the levels of “engagements” they sold to advertisers — advertisers who might be rethinking their investments on a platform they were assured would have full-spectrum reach. Has the Securities and Exchange Commission begun a hard look into the investor statements of this formerly publicly traded company?
Another apparent deception targeted Twitter users who counted on the platform for breaking news or bubbling debates. They relied on Dorsey’s promise of neutrality. When former president Donald Trump's account was canceled, and information about Hunter Biden was tightly rationed, at least the decisions were public, and Twitter users could factor them into their perceptions of the world. Not so with secret protocols.
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Finally, there are the folks — I raise my hand here — who defended Twitter to our conservative friends and followers. Over and over, I and others on the center-right knocked down talk of behind-the-scenes activists busy silencing dissidents from the approved party line. We were trying to contain what political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” But the folks paranoid about Twitter have been proved right, and those of us who dismissed their concerns: wrong, wrong, wrong. Try getting anyone on the right to believe assurances of good faith from Big Tech again.
The most damaging result of this scandal will be the further erosion of faith in elections in the social media era. The Twitter Files license an endless series of counterfactuals that cannot be proven or disproven. “If Twitter hadn’t tipped the scales, then [fill in the blank] wouldn’t have happened.” Once again, conservatives have been told to trust a public square that turns out to be rigged against them. Each time it happens, more damage is done. “Russia, Russia, Russia” is going to be supplemented by “Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.”
