The Silence of the Conservative Voice and The Twitter Files

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Is there a silence of conservative voices on social media? One of the narratives coming out of the 2020 election (which we are still talking about three years later) is that there was conspiracy among major tech companies to silence conservative voices. This was merely a talking point until the recent investigative journalism by Matt Taibbi from the internal files and emails as released by Elon Mush. The project is called “The Twitter Files.”

Why This is Important

Twitter, as social media companies goes is middling at best, however, it the place where celebrities, politicians, government agencies, corporations, and ordinary people all meet. Elon Musk is right about it being the public forum. Conversations happen on Twitter that can’t happen on Facebook or Instagram. Twitter is public, anyone can join into any discussion, and anyone can develop a following. Twitter had an instantaneous nature to it due to the short length of tweets as well as having an active feed of new posts. Elon Musk has broken the last part somewhat with his “For You Page” and “Following” tabs. It’s hard to see a mix of people you follow and people saying things you might be interested in.

Since Musk’s controversial takeover, he has unbanned many accounts that were banned in the past and the For You Tab has taken a right-wing bent. In just my personal FYT I’ve seen blatant racism, sexism, and endorsement of violence against minorities.

Ultimately, Twitter is important because the people that are on it are important. Without all the visible people on the platform, Twitter would have closed up shop years ago. It barely got off the ground to begin with and Twitter has rode the wave of being one of the most cited social media platforms in the interest ecosystem second only, possible, to Reddit. Twitter has caused revolutions so violent that foreign governments will ban its use (Iran, China, Turkey, Russia).

Let’s explore what the Twitter Files revealed and see if there is anything to the serious allegations that have been put forth by Matt Taibbi and others.

Matt Taibbi and the Twitter Files

The main thrust of the Twitter Files is that Twitter worked with the FBI and other agencies to ban accounts on its platform and silence certain voices that the government had deemed “misinformation.” Celebrities and unknowns were the target of the probe and during the 2020 election both the White House (Trump) and the Biden campaign submitted requests that were unilaterally taken seriously. Alex Bernstein contends in his lawsuits that he came under attack during this time and had his account banned (which has now been restored).

In additional Twitter Threads by Taibbi and Bari Weiss, they reveal the “secret Twitter blacklists” The accounts of Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya were revealed to have been prevented from trending or given a “do not amplify” mark so that their tweets would not trend and would not get too far. Bongino was removed from search. All three came under scrutiny by Twitter due to incendiary messages that supposedly violated community standards. The project points out that across all these cases, the rules were not evenly applied with the implication that Left-wing accounts did not have the same scrutiny as Right-wing accounts.

This idea was amplified in January of 2021 when we got the granddaddy of all bans: the banning of Donald Trump on 8 January 2021, just weeks before he was to leave office in response to the coup attempt on 6 January. Michael Shellenberger, in his contributions, says that Twitter executives violated their own rules and policies in order to ban Trump and that they didn’t even consider the implications for free speech and democracy when they decided to take the decision. Shellenberger editorializes by pointing out that the leadership of Twitter at the time was overwhelmingly progressive. He reveals through slack channel screenshots and other data that the executive team at Twitter was plotting away at how to put an end to Trump’s most popular platform.

After that, we’re back to Taibbi and the interactions between the FBI and Twitter which he describes as, “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.” This is the part where we get into the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Matt Taibbi has coined a new phrase and described it in the starkest of terms, “This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does.”

To prove this censorship in the next thread he goes into the FBI and Twitter interactions which by this time included the Department of Homeland Security and the new FBI Election Command Post which was setup in the aftermath of the 2016 election to monitor future election problems. The issue here seems to be several accounts “making jokes” and “using satire” were flagged for election misinformation. None of the accounts he listed has much of a following. He finished the thread by stating at the Russian interference in the 2016 election has enabled a buildout of a censorship apparatus similar to the rise of the security state following 9-11. FBI and DHS sent over so many reports and flags that Twitter employees congratulated themselves on going through them all via Slack channels. Twitter was not under any obligation to do anything with this information and was under no obligation to flag anything or ban anything. It appears based on this reporting that Twitter was fine to cooperate with the FBI. It does not appear that the FBI was coercing them.

It should be noted that all these FBI programs and election integrity systems would have been put in place under the Trump administration. If Trump feared what the “deep state” and FBI would do, then it seems to be that they would have shut this stuff down, especially when they had unified government control from 2016-2018.

In this next thread from Michael Shellenberger we get into the Hunter Biden Laptop Story. The Hunter Biden laptop story starts with a computer repair man who reported the computer that had been left with him to the FBI in 2019. The FBI did not respond right away but he sent the information to Rudy Giuliani who leaked it to the NY Post. Over the last few years, we’ve seen various videos of Hunter Biden naked, carrying a gun while naked, and other salacious videos. However, the NY Post story focused on his work at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. He also had contracts with various Chinese companies where he earned tens of millions of dollars for “no meaningful work.” One of the emails in the story was from an executive thanking him for meeting his Father who was Vice President at the time. Don’t forget that alongside of this, Trump had pressured Zelenskyy to open an investigation on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election to throw suspicion on Joe Biden. The FBI repeatedly sent information to Twitter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian misinformation and to not platform the story. The FBI also approached Facebook with similar information. Apparently, various former FBI agents also started working at Twitter and had their own slack channel. The FBI had convinced Twitter that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a hack-and-dump story and to disregard it. There is various documentation of back and forth between the FBI and Twitter over the story.

In the next thread we move on to Lee Fang and how Twitter helped the US Military’s influence operations. Lee Fang states that, “One Twitter official who spoke to me said he feels deceived by the covert shift. Still, many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.” The complete story about how the Pentagon ran Twitter accounts and how the company whitelisted those accounts was covered by The Intercept.

There is a brief tweet from David Zweig about how Twitter rigged the covid debate by suppressing anyone who didn’t go along with the main narrative. I’ve also published on this subject so we’ll not review it again here, instead we’ll move on to Russia and Twitter. In 2017, Facebook banned 300 accounts of suspected Russian origin and who had been pushing various Russian narratives in Facebook groups and in comment sections. Twitter was not worried about their own situation and in private documents said that they were going to push people to Facebook. Twitter, suffering under a PR attack from people like Hillary Clinton, and formed a task force to self-investigate but they only found 20 accounts of any note. This began and pattern of closely working with intelligence services. “Twitter soon settled on its future posture. In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

We finish up with the Russiagate investigation and its involvement with social media. After looking into various things and working with congressional staffers and offices, especially Senator Richard Blumenthal Taibbi concludes, “Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record.” Devin Nunes said, “Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work… By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

Let’s Talk About Matt

Matt Taibbi has also seen his former party and many people turned against him. In this article, we see how many people on the Left have ignored him and vilified him for reporting on this. Matt Taibbi has gone from a consistent left-wing commentator to a darling of the right by taking on this story and reporting that there may have been government censorship which is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

It is no surprise that Taibbi has become a target. The pandemic seems to have brought out the authoritarian tendencies in everyone, but especially the Left. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying did yeoman’s work on the origins of Covid-19 and the vaccine safety issues and were demonetized on YouTube for spreading disinformation that later turned out to not be so false. Their channel still has not been restored. The idea that someone, somewhere should be responsible for shutting down people who promote lies in the name of public safety is difficult because where is the line between free speech and genuine harm?

Musk’s passion for free speech seems to only extend to American shores. According to this report based on Reporters Without Borders, Musk has given into nearly every request by Indian and Turkish governments. In addition to that, it appears that Ukrainian intelligence has also been working with the FBI and Twitter (before Musk) to silence accounts that it did not approve of posting. In this Twitter thread, FBI emails seem to reveal a relationship between Ukrainian intelligence and the FBI regarding Twitter. The most damning part is that it was a Western journalist they sought to block.

Another aspect of this is how conservative voices have been silenced by other organizations or simply through PR. The Global Disinformation Index has been tied to the State Department via funding and they use their reach to rate conservative outlets like Reason lower and therefore sow distrust about the outlets.

Is it Real?

However, despite everything we have learned, it is important to keep some perspective on this topic. In a recent court filing, Twitters lawyers, now working for Musk, admitted that there was nothing in the Twitter Files that revealed anything important and that the company could not be sued for any of the information contained in a case brought by Donald Trump. The contention that the government was bribing tech companies to comply with its requests was false. There was compensation for complying with search requests which is required. The idea that somehow Twitter was coerced into censoring certain accounts, one of the biggest parts of the Twitter Files is denied by Twitter’s lawyers. In this CNN article, they report that Twitter was actually under no obligation to censor any tweets or suspend any accounts. They took action on their own and in the same court case with Trump they admitted that under Musk or with a new CEO, nothing would change about their content moderation strategy.

I’m sure that the emails and such are real and the slack channel messages are authentic. However, much more is being made of them then I think is really fair to both Twitter and to the idea of censorship. Government censorship is a major problem. The First Amendment to the US Constitutions is meant to prevent this and this country has often taken this right quite seriously in both law and at the Supreme Court. Long gone are the days where one can be arrested for saying vulgar things in public. The days of the Hays code and Hollywood self-censorship are past as well. The fight for free speech has gone one in various forms, especially in the world of pornography and comedy.

TV networks and movie studios have slowly allowed more salacious things as the years have gone by. People are generally free to say what they wish. That’s the container this story takes place in. What Matt Taibbi asserts with this reporting is that there is an active effort by the Federal government to pick information winners and losers. If you agree with the government narrative, that speech goes through. The speech of people like the Intellectual Dark Web does not necessarily get through.

I am a free speech absolutist because I like to be able to write whatever I would like to write and I need the free speech of reporters, journalists, scientists and others to do my job effectively. I need to be able to trust them and my trust is placed in the idea that anyone can say what they want to in a civilized society without fear of government backlash or punishment.

I don’t find a real threat to free speech within this reporting as I’ve described it above. Twitter faced no legal consequences for not taking these actions unless it was under a search warrant as signed by a judge. Twitter was paid for producing stuff from warrant searches. No one at Twitter was ever at risk of getting arrested and neither were any of the people who owned the taken down accounts. Twitter is a private company with its own terms of use and its own policies. The Federal Government, generally, cannot arrest people on the basis of a tweet. However, there are some cases where the government can arrest people for certain kinds of speech. For example, Kathy Griffin was nearly prosecuted by the Department of Justice on federal charges for conspiring to assassinate the President of the United States. How did a perky comedienne catch this case? She took a photo of a plastic head resembling President Trump covered in obviously fake blood, “…a mask with ketchup,” is how she describes the photo. She took a fun picture that would inflame the right and make liberals laugh and the Trump administration tried to put her prison for it and her career has been forever damaged because of the incident. The fact that Hollywood turned its back on Kathy Griffin is the decisions of private individuals and I have no problem with how they reacted. However, the fact that the DOJ went after her and she had to spend a fortune on lawyers to save herself is where I take issue. This is where Matt Taibbi should take issue as well. Are we really going to complain about a handful of Twitter accounts that were taken down for saying inflammatory things or pushing malformation that could harm people? Can we also complain about this when it was done by a private company of its own accord without any legal consequences for anyone involved?

Fight for Fair Time

This is not the right-wing’s first brush with media and getting socked by the media and wanting to create an alternative. In the wake of Watergate, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone and others did not want another president taken down by the media and vowed to create an alternative. When cable news came along, Roger Ailes was already working at CNN and MSNBC and launched Fox News in 1996. Conservative talk radio had already taken over the AM dial in the 1980s so a conservative cable news network was the natural extension of that media juggernaut. It is no secret that most of the people who work in major media go to Ivy League schools, vote democrat, and have progressive political views. This was as true in the day of Walter Cronkite as it is now.

In academia, conservative voices were already on their way out through the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, academia was firmly liberal as a result of young boomers, who had protested the Vietnam war, taking ever more jobs in Academia and ascending through the leadership. The news media drifted further left and conservative voices were practically non-existent. This might seem counter intuitive at first because the media often does a good job of carrying the water of the Federal government regardless of whoever is in power (see the Iraq war lead up). Often the mainstream media is more of a government transcriptionist than offering criticism of the government or its officials. This is something that most people don’t understand but has always bothered me.

The point here is that this is not the first time conservatives have complained that they are not fairly represented in the media and that their point of view is not represented. I think conservatives would get more purchase if so many of their positions weren’t problematic. Trying to purport that black on black crime has to do with the lower IQ of African-Americans is simple racism and doesn’t address the underlying issues. If conservatives offered real policy positions that addressed the real issues of people then a real debate could be had about those policies but too often the conservative message is to elevate one group of people over another and that idea has become repugnant to most people.

What’s Next?

It isn’t clear what will ever come of the Twitter files and the new “censorship industrial complex” the congressional hearings around the “weaponization” of the government in 2020 aren’t going anywhere fast. The Twitter Files will of course make the rounds on right-wing media but the story is nearly over. Nothing really has happened since then and there weren’t any major bombshells out of it all. I read through all the threads I could find on Twitter about this and even read the replies. It’s not great that Twitter was so ready, willing, and able to comply with the governments requests but it appears that they weren’t under any sort of coercion to do so.

How we handle “misinformation” in an age of information is something we are going to have to work on. The case where this was the most obvious was during Covid when much of the science around the virus was obfuscated. When it comes to free speech and transparency in government, we need to bolster institutions that will keep the public informed, no matter the cost. People can do better when they have the information and can believe in their government and institutions. I hope that the legacy of the Twitter Files is that too close of collaboration between the government and the private sector is not always a good thing and we need some new laws around these kinds of issues.