The preposterous premise of the Twitter Files
This shouldn't need explaining. But, here we are.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the January 6th committee considered detailed evidence that Tech platforms, including Twitter:
failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals (my bold). The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.
“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
In the end, however, “committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies…”
The Post had reported last July that a former Twitter employee testified to this effect before the January 6 committee. In that earlier report, the Post noted that the employee had said Twitter considered stricter content moderation policies for President Trump after he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by"1 during a September 2020 debate with Joe Biden. In the end, though, according to this employee, Twitter demurred because:
“Twitter relished in the knowledge that they were also the favorite and most-used service of the former president and enjoyed having that sort of power within the social media ecosystem,” the employee said. If Trump had been “any other user on Twitter, he would have been permanently suspended a very long time ago.”
The new story is of particular interest because it essentially directly contradicts the premise of the Twitter Files, the series of Twitter threads authored over the past month by Matt Taibbi and others, under the aegis of Elon Musk. The Twitter Files purport to show that the deep state colluded with Twitter to deplatform, shadow ban and otherwise violate the free speech of key conservative actors, including former President Donald Trump. Notably, they argue, Twitter “censored” the Hunter Biden laptop story in an effort to thwart Trump’s reelection bid. They have also claimed that Twitter inappropriately censored “dissenting” voices about Covid, including around the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
The Twitter Files narrative reinforces and amplifies rightwing grievances that, in recent years, have focused on the supposed liberal bias of Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook, leading to content moderation policies that crush free speech by unfairly restricting dissemination of conservative viewpoints. This itself is, of course, derivative of much longer standing conservative complaints about liberal media bias. This nonstop drone of complaint about the stifling of conservative voices has long served a clear purpose, which the Republican National Chairman, Rich Bond, spelled out plainly three decades ago: to “work the refs.” The refs are the media, specifically political journalists, and the goal, Bond explained is that "[t]here is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Concerning the specific charges leveled against the tech platforms, the evidence from reputable studies of the phenomenon show the opposite. For example, an NYU study from 2021 found:
“There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms…In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”
Other analyses have shown that tech algorithms favor conservatives, in part because engagement begets engagement, notwithstanding the indisputable fact that systematic lying and propagation of highly consequential and dangerous conspiracy theories - which one could argue are plausible grounds for content moderation - are far more rife on dominant rightwing media, like FOX News than is true of mainstream news sources (the so-called “liberal media.”) Among these, which Josh Marshall aptly characterized yesterday as political propaganda, include the outlandishly false claims that “Jan. 6 was an Antifa operation, millions of ‘illegals’ voting in 2020 gave the election to Joe Biden, young people around the world dropping dead because of COVID vaccines, mass shootings conducted by crisis actors to justify gun confiscation.”
It’s estimated that there were 200 billion tweets last year. And Facebook dwarfs Twitter in terms of active users, with an estimated three billion active worldwide. Which is to say, content moderation of such an enormous galaxy of information is an extraordinarily difficult task. The enormity of the task doesn’t let the Tech platforms off the hook if they don’t do it well, or couldn’t do it better, a subject of endless discussion. But as TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway spelled out clearly, the Twitter Files reduced that enormously complex task as it unfolded at Twitter to cherrypicked snippets from a much larger universe of internal chatter between employees at the platform. And since Musk will not make publicly available that larger universe, there is simply no reason to take at face value the credibility of the Twitter Files’ underlying claims.
The reality is that no voices are louder, or better amplified in our political discourse by myriad channels than those of the obstreperous right. More to the point, the premise of the argument as deployed by Trumpists, or by anti-anti-Trumpists (like Taibbi) - that Trump and his ilk are a collective David fighting against the Goliath that is the deep state - is preposterous. In reality, Trumpism is a grave danger in part due to its tremendous influence within the very institutions Trumpists claim as their enemy. The Post article this week provides a hint of the reality of those power dynamics, in contrast to the farcical inversion of that reality that the Twitter Files carry on.
In 2020, during Trump’s first impeachment for having illegally withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, Rebecca Gordon explained how Trump had mangled traditional understandings of a “deep state” to suit his own purposes. That traditional understanding saw the deep state in various global contexts as a "kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy." That meaning morphed under Trump. According to Gordon, rather than referring to a "‘shadow or parallel system of government’ operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government — or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.”
Gordon elaborates:
When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that's the deep state at work as far as he's concerned. Want to proclaim "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state.
Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.
Gordon makes clear that she is a critic of the “military-industrial complex” and of powerful vested interests, in the government, especially the national security bureaucracies, as well as the private sector (as well as the revolving door between the two), that are able to operate in defiance of democratic accountability and oversight. Those interests persist through and constrain every presidency in varied way. But Trump is not a principled proponent of those intertwined interests. Indeed, he has constantly sought advantage within them. Instead, his relentless invocation of the deep state trope serves two primary purposes - 1) to shield himself from accountability for his serial wrongdoing and 2) to gin up popular outrage among his most ardent followers in order to increase the potential costs of trying to hold him accountable.
There has been ample evidence for years that in many of the branches of the national security state, broadly speaking - from the FBI, to border enforcement, to the military itself, as well as local police forces around the country - there is widespread sympathy, if not outright adulation for Donald Trump. That fact alone calls into question the notion that Trump is a brave dissident challenging the forces of state coercion (especially since he’s such an enthusiastic cheerleader for state violence when it’s directed at his enemies). But on the more direct question of whether Trump and his allies have been uniquely victimized by a conspiracy of liberal-dominated social media platforms, the incredibly loud fulminations of certain conspiracists notwithstanding, the best evidence points in the opposite direction. Which itself illustrates how much projects like the Twitter Files are, despite their own pretensions, not brave displays of truth-telling. Instead, they are craven exercises in perpetuating myths convenient to the interests of a dangerous oligarch and would-be authoritarian and his allies.
there has been ample evidence that the Proud Boys saw this as a critical moment of recognition and were able to recruit especially successfully subsequent to Trump’s comment.
The Twitter Files are very significant. The cub reporters denigrating this work are a joke. What is exposed in the Twitter Files should scare everyone. Just read them, they're short.
Example: Twitter blacklisted eminent doctors and scientists deeply damaging our response to Covid. Drug companies and "the government" were able to coerce Twitter and other major platforms. This is a literal crime.
The Twitter files are VERY significant.