Taibbi's "Twitter Files" Flop, But Will It Matter?
Hello, dear readers. Welcome to another edition of The Present Age. I’m your host Parker Molloy.
Today, I’ll be writing a bit about the first installment in
’s “The Twitter Files,” which is, ostensibly, a work of journalism.
“The Twitter Files” is Taibbi’s reporting on a collection of internal emails that new Twitter owner Elon Musk made available to a handful of journalism-adjacent political allies.
During a Twitter Spaces interview, Musk admitted leaking internal Twitter emails to Taibbi, conservative writer
, and possibly others.But for as much as Taibbi tried to hype this up as “an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms,” there wasn’t really much there that was actually newsworthy.
“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine,” Taibbi wrote, eight tweets into his thread. “One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’”
As others were quick to note, the tweets that Biden’s campaign requested be taken down pretty clearly violated Twitter’s terms of service, with many of them containing nude photos of Biden’s son Hunter.
To be clear: what Taibbi describes in “The Twitter Files” seems to be some pretty standard content moderation, and he doesn’t at any point demonstrate wrongdoing.
He notes, “Both parties had access to these tools,” referring to the ability to report individual tweets as violating Twitter’s rules. This… is not actually news.
Social media companies assign employees to work hand-in-hand with political campaigns for exactly this purpose. After the 2016 election, there were articles written about why the Trump campaign was smart to take Twitter, Facebook, and Google up on offers to embed employees within their campaigns while the Clinton campaign declined. From that story, published by Politico in 2017:
While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.
Such support was critical for the Trump campaign, which didn’t invest heavily in its own digital operations during the primary season and made extensive use of Facebook, Twitter and Google “embeds” for the general election, says the study, conducted by communications professors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah.
The companies offered such services, without charge, to all the 2016 candidates, according to the study, which details extensive tech company involvement at every stage of the race. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined to embed the companies’ employees in her operations, instead opting to develop its own digital apparatus and call in the tech firms to help execute elements of its strategy.
It would have been shocking had the Biden campaign reached out to Twitter and said, “Take down X tweet! It hurts our narrative! Delete it!!!” — especially about something that didn’t violate Twitter’s rules — but that’s not what they did (or at least, not what Taibbi has demonstrated). What he described was simply the campaign reporting tweets that were in violation of the site’s rules, very similar to what literally anybody on the platform can do. The Biden campaign just relayed their reports through one of their Twitter contacts, which Trump had, as well.
Now, I know that I’m giving Taibbi the benefit of the doubt here (even though, honestly, there’s not really a reason I should) when I say that I’m going to assume that he meant “Trump campaign” and not “Trump White House” in this tweet. The distinction matters, even though Trump pretty clearly didn’t care about this. If it was the Trump White House (i.e. the federal government) and not his campaign, then that is a giant story… but it’s not the one Taibbi wants to tell.
Also, notice this pivot, from “both parties had access to these tools” to “this system wasn’t balanced,” and then hinting that because the overwhelming majority of Twitter employees who made donations directly to candidates donated to Democrats, this system favored Democrats. This is a red herring. It’s an obvious red herring because even if you ignore the fact that the people who were raking in cash at these companies were more likely to funnel their political dollars through dark money groups (which wouldn’t show up on a document like the Open Secrets link Taibbi shared), and even if you ignore that content moderation decisions were being made by people at the highest levels of the company and not by your average entry-level sales rep, this doesn’t actually address how “this system” was used.
Surely, if there were examples of the Biden campaign demanding that tweets they didn’t like (but didn’t violate the company’s rules) be taken down, Taibbi would have shown that. He didn’t. Why? Is he saving that for “part two?” Is it because there aren’t examples of this? And why didn’t Taibbi explain the context of the tweets the Biden team flagged? The only reasonable conclusion I can draw here is that Taibbi is taking this project on for political purposes (his political philosophy seems to mostly be that he’s “anti-anti-Trump,” as some have phrased it — insistence on not being a supporter of Trump or Republicans while exclusively rushing to the defense of Trump and Republicans — oh, and he’s also really anti-trans, which maybe helps explain why Musk went to him with this story).
At this point, we’re now… 17 tweets into Taibbi’s thread and he hasn’t exposed a single controversial claim. Oh, and also, did you know that Taibbi had to “agree to certain conditions” in order to do this story? What are those conditions? We’ll probably never know, but oh well! I’m sure that’s not important or anything.
Finally, 18 tweets in, Taibbi starts talking about the New York Post’s sloppy “Hunter Biden” story.
Let’s all remember that the reporting on this story was so shoddy that longtime New York Post reporter Bruce Golding refused to put his name on it, and the source of Hunter Biden’s “laptop” was Rudy Giuliani, who specified that he chose to leak it to the Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”
What Giuliani describes in that quote is called journalism.
By not making the “laptop” available to other news outlets and simply demanding that outlets write up hysterical “Hunter Biden Something Something [sorry, I’m still unclear what the scandal about Hunter Biden was supposed to even be!]” stories, Giuliani and the Post were making abundantly clear that they were carrying out a political hit near-identical to the chaos that ensued following the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 (which Taibbi downplayed, as he is wont to do, being one of the big critics of “Russiagate” — yes, Russia was behind the hack of the DNC emails, and yes, that was worth looking into).
All of this is to say that there were plenty of reasons to question the veracity of “the laptop” and the Post’s stories about it (which, much like Taibbi’s “Twitter Files,” seems to have relied mostly on implied wrongdoing without actually saying what the scandal being reported actually was).
As we all know, for two days Twitter prevented people from tweeting a link to the Post’s story. They were allowed to discuss it, but any tweet that contained a link to it was blocked from being sent. Taibbi wrote that “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” and adding, “They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases.”
This wasn’t exactly true.
In 2018, the website Splinter published an article titled, “Here’s Stephen Miller’s Cell Phone Number, If You Need It.” Here it was in its entirety (I edited out the number, as I’m sure he’s changed it since).
The Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families has been credited primarily to the strenuous efforts of White House adviser Stephen Miller. Perhaps you would like to call him about it.
The New York Times reported that Miller, the wolfish young Trump whisperer, has been the most effective driving force behind the implementation of the brutal policy that is now leading the national news—a policy that Miller himself called “a simple decision.” And while citizens plan protest marches and scream at Kirstjen Nielsen as she eats dinner, Miller himself has been rather unavailable for direct feedback from the public.
We all know that Donald Trump is a great fan of facilitating direct feedback from the public, because he personally published the cell phone numbers of both his Republican primary opponent Lindsey Graham and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. So it is fair to assume he would support the public’s right to call (or text) Stephen Miller.
Miller’s cell phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX. He’s a busy guy, but maybe you can get ahold of him long enough to have a productive discussion.
Twitter responded by, you guessed it: suspending Splinter’s Twitter account, blocking the link from being shared on the site or in direct messages, and suspending every account that tweeted the link prior to the block (as well as suspending anyone who tweeted screenshots from it). It was a controversial move! And, as it happens, this was the same exact same action and exact same listed reason from Twitter when it came to the Post’s “Hunter Biden” story:
If you open the Post story in question, you’ll be hit with a large collection of unredacted contact info for Hunter Biden and others. Whatever other arguments there are (or were) to be made about Twitter’s decision to block links to that story (and the company’s shifting reasoning, which was partially laid out in Taibbi’s story), you can’t honestly argue that this was in any way inconsistent with how Twitter handled Splinter’s article sharing Miller’s phone number. If anything, the need to shift from using the same justification the site used to block Splinter to something new and different(that is still being debated more than two years later) demonstrates that posts from left-leaning news outlets were held to higher standards than stories by right-wing outlets like the New York Post.
Right-wing outlets have spent the days since Taibbi’s thread screaming about this being some gigantic scandal and berating mainstream outlets for not just running with the Musk-Taibbi narrative.
This is not new. In fact, this is exactly what the right did when reputable news outlets tried to fact-check the “laptop” story before publishing their own pieces about it. And just as Rudy Giuliani (source of the laptop, which should raise plenty of red flags on its own) refused to provide access to the documents he gave to the New York Post to outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post, Musk has done the same here.
The Times requested copies of the documents but didn’t receive a response. Without the documents, there’s not actually much reporting the Times can do. Instead of noting that it would be ethically dubious for the Times to publish a story based entirely on the reporting of Taibbi, an opinion writer, Musk claimed that the Times “has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians.” (This, by the way, is hilarious, as the Times has shifted significantly to the right in the past decade or so.)
“Musk is basically handing over investigative pieces to opinion writers,” writer
wrote on Twitter. "So we have no idea about how much their opinions shape the story, or how much basic fact checking has been done. Not promising that they refuse to share the materials the stories are based on."
Expect this to join the many, many, many examples of the right’s effort to rewrite history, joining things like “Obama’s IRS targeted conservative groups!” and “Russia’s involvement in hacking and distributing DNC emails in 2016 was a hoax!” as things conservatives take at face value.
The scandal is the scandal is the scandal. That’s what the Right keeps drumming, and any attempt to dig into the actual things that they yell are scandalous is automatically partisan.
This is one of those things that makes no objective sense.
This is clearly a nothingburger, so all it really does is tell everyone who might disagree with Musk in the future (so, anyone, really) that Musk will leak confidential/private information to get an advantage on you.
If you're an advertiser who has ever said "please don't serve my ads next to Nazis or porn stars", you can expect that Musk will release that information out of context to try and punish you for disagreeing with him.