The Twitter Files

Published: Sun 02 April 2023
Updated: Tue 04 April 2023
By steve

In Markets.

Sunday 2, April 2023

What we know from the Twitter Files

I am no fan of Elon Musk. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a narcissistic psychopath. But even narcissistic psychopaths have been known to do some good sometimes. He has released some internal Twitter documents to a few well-known journalists. (Well, one who is well known, but the others who are unknown to me, but may be well known in the US). These reveal, at the very least, an extremely high-handed attitude on the part of the content moderators in the Twitter of old, before it became a privately owned plaything of Elon Musk.

It’s a pity that this was not just a big data dump of everything, and that it was released to a selective subset of journalists who might have been persuaded to turn a blind eye to some data. It seems to me clear that the release was made in an attempt to cast the previous management in a bad light, and Elon in a good one.

The coverage of the misdeeds of Twitter are readily available from a web search. (I recommend Yacy, the distributed search engine, but at the very least try a few in addition to Google and Bing). A representative example is the story of how tweets from Brett Giroir were deleted at the request of Scott Gottlieb. The latter was on Twitter’s board, and also happens to be a board member of Pfizer. Oh, the tweet from Giroir said that natural immunity resulting from catching COVID might be superior to that resulting from vaccination. He also tweeted that COVID did not represent a severe risk to a child under 11 years of age. That was deleted too.

The problem is that Twitter curates content, and suppresses content which it doesn’t like. That’s fine, but it has a quasi-monopoly position, and using this can control what appears in the mainstream media. A lack of competing opinions in the mainstream media is well understood to be a threat to democracy, and is (notionally) blocked in democratic regimes. It just seems wrong that we tolerate it in social media, which still pretends that it is ‘just a platform’ which carries the views of its members without exercising editorial control.

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