Asserts Eric Levitz at Intelligencer.
All right. We have seen the "nothingburger" response to the Twitter Files. This is the I'm-rubber-you’re-glue response: You are the very thing that you denounce.
Let's see how we'll this argument works. I'll cut as close to the core as I can for this excerpt:
[The Taibbi and Weiss] reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity....
To appreciate how unhinged the conservative narrative about the “Twitter Files” is, and how irresponsible Musk’s presentation of them has been, one must first understand the flimsiness of the [New York Post] article that kicked off the whole controversy....
There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice president. Burisma... was paying to be one-degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.... But... Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal....
[The] 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. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message
In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision.
Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim....
Both [Yoel] Roth and [Jim] Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”...
... Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”...
... 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...
“If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” Musk tweeted, going on to explain, “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”
Of course, 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.
And even if it had, so long as the government did not coerce Twitter into suppressing the Post story, there would still have been no constitutional violation; the government is allowed to ask private actors to keep information secret....
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....
Since at least 2018, Twitter’s help page has said, “When abuse or manipulation of our service is reported or detected, we may take action to limit the reach of a person’s Tweets.”... Twitter’s current ownership has openly embraced this form of content moderation. Last month, Musk tweeted: “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”
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 did not try to reconcile that claim with Twitter’s long-standing terms of service; in fact, she did not even inform her readers of the existence of those terms....
[Weiss] led her readers to believe that she’d caught Twitter in a lie. In other words, she deliberately misled her audience....
[S]he suggests that the conservative personalities Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk were placed on blacklists because of their political views. Yet both those commentators are provocateurs who quite plausibly might have violated the platform’s rules regarding abuse at one point or another....
Weiss suggests that these blacklists disproportionately harmed conservatives. But she doesn’t actually provide any information about the ideological breakdown of blacklisted accounts....
[P]re-Musk Twitter’s content curation policies made rightwing content more visible — and leftwing content, less — than a purely neutral hosting of tweets would have done.
A journalist interested in impartially reporting on the political implications of Twitter’s content moderation policies might have mentioned this reality....
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....
