Twitter Files

The Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads based on internal Twitter, Inc. documents shared by owner Elon Musk with freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in December 2022.

Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the release of the documents with Twitter management. The first thread, written by Taibbi, detailed the deliberation process Twitter took regarding the restriction of a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy in October 2020 as well as some other content. Musk and Republicans alleged the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress information. Taibbi tweeted that the Twitter files showed "no evidence ... of any government involvement in the laptop story", thus failing to support a conservative claim that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories. Taibbi also did not say any Democrats had asked Twitter to suppress the story.

The second thread, written by Weiss, addressed what Musk has called "shadow banning" of some users, a practice referred to as "visibility filtering" by previous Twitter management.

Background

See also: Hunter Biden laptop controversy

On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published articles using emails from a laptop which the Post alleged to show corruption by then-US presidential candidate candidate Joe Biden with regard to his son Hunter Biden's tenure as a director at Burisma Holdings Limited. Then-President Donald Trump made several false claims about Joe Biden's involvement. In March 2022, in-depth investigations by the Washington Post and New York Times authenticated the relevant emails, but did not find that Joe Biden had committed any improprieties.

Later on October 14, Twitter decided to restrict the sharing of the Post's story under its "hacked materials" policy, and locked accounts that shared it, including those of the newspaper and then White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany. The moves drew widespread criticism from Trump supporters, who claimed that software companies censored their viewpoints.

On October 19, 2020, 51 former senior intelligence officials released an open letter stating that the release of the alleged emails "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation", though they refrained from saying the emails were not genuine. There had been extensive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election via social media. In August 2022, Mark Zuckerberg stated that a prior FBI warning about an impending Russian disinformation "dump" prompted Facebook to suppress the New York Post story. Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth had testified that Twitter received similar warnings. In response, conservatives alleged that the FBI had pressured Twitter to suppress the story; however, Taibbi said he did not see evidence of this while reviewing the files.

Publication

On November 28, 2022, Musk promised that "The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself." The internal Twitter documents were given by Musk to freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Taibbi noted that "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions" that he did not disclose. Weiss later wrote that the only condition they agreed to was that the material would be first published on Twitter.

On December 6, James A. Baker, deputy general counsel at Twitter, was fired by Elon Musk for allegedly vetting information before it was passed on to Taibbi and Weiss, and providing an explanation that Musk found "unconvincing". Baker had been involved in the decision to withhold the laptop story, and had previously been general counsel for the FBI when he was a witness for, but not implicated in, the failed John Durham prosecution of Michael Sussmann on allegations he worked with the 2016 Clinton campaign to advance a Russian collusion narrative against Trump.

Content

According to Taibbi, the Twitter Files number in the thousands. According to CNBC's December 7 publication, Musk said that the future "Twitter Files" releases would include how Twitter handled the 2020 presidential election, the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part one (by Matt Taibbi)

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who published the first installment of the documents

On December 2, Taibbi published a Twitter thread revealing internal Twitter emails, interspersed with his own reporting. Elon Musk retweeted Taibbi's thread. Some of these documents described Twitter's internal deliberations regarding the decision to censor the reporting of the New York Post regarding the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, while others contained information on how Twitter treated tweets that were flagged for removal at the request of the 2020 Biden campaign team and the Trump White House.

Taibbi's thread revealed an internal debate on whether Twitter should prevent the New York Post story from being shared. Twitter leadership decided to suppress the story, arguing that it fell under the company's prohibition on hacked materials. According to Taibbi, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was unaware of the decision when it was made; days later, he reversed the story's suppression, calling it a "mistake", and Twitter updated its hacked materials policy to state that news stories about hacked materials would be permitted, but with a contextual warning.

Taibbi reported Twitter had "received and honored" deletion requests from both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House; he presented examples of the former but not of the latter. Taibbi also said Twitter had blocked tweets by former Trump administration officials promoting the New York Post story, but did not say that Democrats had requested action on the story. He said Democrats had more contacts with Twitter than did Republicans, but provided no internal documents to establish that. Taibbi also shared communications between Rep. Ro Khanna and then-Twitter head of legal Vijaya Gadde, in which Khanna criticized Twitter's decision to censor the Post story.

The Biden campaign asked Twitter to review five tweets, which were later deleted. Taibbi did not disclose the content of the Biden campaign requests, presenting only their URLs; the content of four deleted tweets were later found by others from internet archives. Those four tweets contained nude photos and videos of Hunter Biden, which violate Twitter policy and California law as revenge porn. The content of the fifth deleted tweet is unknown.

Musk tweeted during the Taibbi presentation that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government" in violation of the First Amendment, though his interpretation of the First Amendment was disputed. Taibbi's reporting undermined a key narrative promoted by Musk and Republicans that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories. Taibbi tweeted, "Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story." Trump was president at the time in question and had appointed the sitting FBI director.

Taibbi's Twitter thread largely confirmed what was already known and did not contain any significant new revelations.

Part two (by Bari Weiss)

On December 4, Musk stated that a second "Twitter Files" release would again involve Taibbi, along with former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.

On December 8, Weiss released the second installment of the "Twitter Files”, which negatively portrayed Twitter's downranking system, established in 2018 to reduce the visibility of some users and their content determined to "detract from the conversation" based on abuse reports and related metrics. Weiss shared several images of the internal Twitter system, shared with her by Twitter Trust and Safety manager Ella Irwin, with various accounts marked as blacklisted in different ways: "Trends Blacklist," “Search Blacklist”, “Do Not Amplify”. The blacklisted accounts include Jay Bhattacharya, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, and others. Musk and Weiss have called this downranking system "shadow banning," using a less restrictive definition (limits on sharing) than Twitter had previously used for the term (complete blocking of sharing). Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's former head of product, responded on Twitter that Weiss was "characterizing any de-amplification as equating to shadow banning which is either a lazy interpretation or deliberately misleading."

After Weiss's publication, Musk claimed that an upcoming update to the Twitter platform will show to the user whether the user has been "shadowbanned," the reason why, and how to appeal.

Writing for Forbes, Robert Hart wrote that the old system of downranking at Twitter, which he said Weiss had characterized as secretive and nefarious acts of censorship, was similar to Musk's current policy which Musk referred to as "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach"

Reactions

Politicians

After the Taibbi thread, former Trump White House official and conservative radio host Seb Gorka said, "so far, I’m deeply underwhelmed." He rejected statements made by posters on Truth Social that the First Amendment had been violated. In a Fox News interview, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy defended Taibbi's reporting and said of Elon Musk that his critics are "trying to discredit a person for telling the truth".

Democratic House Representative Ro Khanna confirmed the authenticity of his email to Twitter where he criticized the suppression of the New York Post's story as a violation of First Amendment principles. He also said that Twitter should implement "clear and public criteria" of removal or non-promotion of content, make such decisions in a transparent way, and give users a way to appeal the decisions.

Legal scholars

According to David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, Twitter is free to decide what content to allow on its platform, and both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House were free to make content suggestions.

Former Twitter employees

Twitter's former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey urged Musk to release all the internal documents "without filter" at once, including all of Twitter's discussions around current and future actions on content moderation.

Taibbi was criticized for his failure to redact email addresses from the published screenshots; Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, called it "fundamentally unacceptable"; Musk conceded that the email addresses should have been redacted.

Journalists

Conservative commentators said that Taibbi's reporting demonstrated the existence of liberal bias at Twitter prior to the company's acquisition by Musk, while many technology journalists wrote that the reported evidence did not demonstrate much more than Twitter's policy team having a difficult time making a tough call, but resolving the matter swiftly.

According to a Forbes article, Taibbi's posts contained "no bombshells", and showed "no government involvement in the laptop story," contradicting a conspiracy theory that claimed the FBI was involved. Taibbi received criticism from MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan for the appearance of performing public relations for Musk; Taibbi responded by asking how many of his critics "have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, [and] White House".

Miranda Devine, a conservative columnist with the New York Post who was among the first to write about the laptop, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the presentation wasn't the "smoking gun we’d hoped for," adding, "I feel that Elon Musk has held back some material," alluding to a meeting he had with Apple CEO Tim Cook days earlier, amid speculation Apple might remove the Twitter app from its App Store. Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote that "the files paint an ugly portrait of a social-media company’s management unilaterally deciding that its role was to keep breaking news away from the public instead of letting people see the reporting and drawing their own conclusions."

The Editorial Board at The Wall Street Journal praised the leak for exposing "a form of political corruption" where current and former U.S. intelligence officials have influence on elections.