After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he allowed a group of independent journalists to get access to proprietary internal information at Twitter. The journalists included Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson. These weren’t “right wing” journalists, nor even particularly conservative ones. They were independent journalists that didn’t have any ties to any media outlets.
For the most part, I think Musk did a nice job in selecting them. I would have liked to have seen more voices like Sharyl Attkisson or Catherine Herridge that had first-hand experience working within legacy media, but for the most part, these journalists did a pretty good job.
His conditions were simple. You have unfettered access to Twitter’s internal correspondences and files. You may pursue the truth wherever it takes you. The only condition is that the findings be published on Twitter/X.
I wrote this article because when I Google “The Twitter Files”, here’s what I see.
To save you the trouble, I’ll summarize for you the ten most “authoritative” information sources about The Twitter Files in Google’s eyes.
- Wikipedia – Wikipedia’s editors use a similar tactic that Google uses in its search results to inject bias into its articles. It publishes a modicum of supposed “encyclopedic” information, and then it stuffs the page with quotes from”authoritative sources” that all happen to espouse a particular POV.
Laughably, Wikipedia doesn’t even cover all of the Twitter Files, and doesn’t even link to them, and yet Google considers this the world’s leading authority - NPR – Google believes the second-most authoritative article about the Twitter Files is an NPR article titled “Elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to discredit foes and push conspiracy theories”. Yes, you paid for that.
- Google considers the third most authoritative site for the Twitter Files—the Twitter Files. It’s as laughable as Charlie Chaplin coming in twentieth a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
- The fourth most “authoritative” article about the Twitter Files is CBS News dutifully serving as apologist for the US Government. “No one forced anyone at Twitter to make changes, they only requested it.” Because everyone knows that if you don’t do what the government requests of you, everything will be fine.
- The fifth most “authoritative” article is from Americans for Prosperity. While this is a right-leaning site, the article reads less as a comprehensive authoritative account of The Twitter Files and more a way to use the Twitter Files to promote their own programs.
- The next “authoritative” article is from that paragon of objective journalism The New Yorker which spends much of the article contorting itself to explain how the Tweet “To all those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th” was a coded message from Trump urging his followers to violence. The article also contains this gem:
After a careful read of the Twitter Files, I don’t think that the evidence suggests a coherent political agenda. It is certainly true that Twitter executives donated, overwhelmingly, to Democratic candidates for public office, and it seems equally true that they expressed mostly progressive views on social media. (In 2017, Yoel Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”)… - It’s not until we get to the seventh Google result that we see an article from The Guardian—a British newspaper—that appears to be somewhat objective.
Here’s the problem. When I come to Google or Wikipedia, I want to learn facts and then make a decision for myself. But modern journalism says this: you are too stupid and it is too dangerous for you to be told facts and to make decisions for yourself, so we will assign your decisions to you.
Is there anything wrong with that? Not at all. To be clear, as a Republic, all of us in the United States vote democratically for people to represent us who are told the facts and make decisions for us.
Here’s the difference. Who “voted” for the WIkipedia Editors, or NPR, or CBS News? Not me. Not you. If I had a choice, the first place I’d look for more details on the Twitter Files would be the journalists who wrote them (most of whom write on Substacks or Medium). And yet Google, in its quest of “protect us” show us only commentary from “safe” places like NPR.
The Twitter Files
For those of you who need a refresher (or who never heard of the Twitter Files), here’s a comprehensive recap of all 19 of them, presented with minimal commentary and with links so you can find them yourself and make your own conclusions.
1 – December 2, 2022 – Suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop Story (Taibbi)
Matt Taibbi posts the initial Twitter Files about Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post and their Hunter Biden laptop story before election day 2020.
2 – December 8, 2022 – Shadowbanning of Conservative Accounts (Weiss)
Bari Weiss posts the second Twitter Files which detailed how Twitter selectively shadowbanned conservative accounts.
3, 4, 5 – December 9, 10, and 12, 2022 – Suspension of President Trump’s Account (Taibbi, Shellenberger, Weiss)
Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Weiss publish the third through fifth Twitter Files, focusing on the internal Twitter team’s collective decision to suspend President Trump’s Twitter account.
6, 7 – December 16 and 19, 2022 – Content Moderation on Twitter (Taibbi, Shellenberger)
In the sixth and seventh Twitter Files Taibbi and Shellenberger discuss the FBI’s role in flagging posts to be moderated based on questionable rationale.
8 – December 20, 2022 – Twitter and US Military Influence Campaigns (Fang)
Lee Fang, in the eighth Twitter File, shows Twitter’s role in US military influence campaigns (Yvan Eht Nioj).
9 – December 24, 2022 – Twitter and Three-Letter Agencies (Taibbi)
The ninth Twitter File by Taibbi details the close relationship that Twitter had with US government agencies like the FBI and the CIA in surveillance and suppression.
10 – December 26, 2022 – Twitter and Public Opinion on COVID-19 (Zweig)
The tenth Twitter File by David Zweig discusses the US Government’s involvement in manipulating public opinion on COVID-19.
11 – January 3, 2023 – Twitter and Russia, Russia, Russia (Taibbi)
The 11th Twitter File by Taibbi focused on how Congressional Democrats and media outlets like Buzzfeed pushed Twitter to produce “evidence” of Russian collusion in the 2016 Trump campaign, even enough no such evidence existed outside of isolated cases of third-rate hackers out of Russia.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear today that Twitter was supposed to play a pivotal role in fabricating evidence of supposed Russian collusion.
12 – January 3, 2023 – Twitter and “The Global Engagement Center” (Taibbi)
The 12th Twitter file, also by Taibbi, shows how a growing number of public and private agencies demanded to get certain accounts banned, including an arm of Federal Governement called the GEC (created during the Obama administration) whose mandate is to “recognize, understand, explose, and counter foreign disinformation”. Among other things, the GEC laughably flagged accounts as “Russian proxies” based on nothing more than espousing particular points of view.
13 – January 8, 2023 – Twitter and Further Manipulation of Public Opinion Around COVID-19 (Berenson)
Alex Berenson writes his first Twitter Files, the 13th overall, about how in August 2021 a Pfizer board member pressured Twitter to put “misleading” tags on tweets that were scientifically accurate because they interfered with the vaccine narrative.
14, 15 – January 12 and 27, 2023 – More Russia, Russia, Russia and Hamilton 68 (Taibbi)
In the 14th and 15th Twitter Files, Taibbi writes about Congressional Democrats continuing to push the narrative that Twitter was being overrun by Russian bots or trolls, despite no evidence other than a tool called “Hamilton 68” which produced highly dubious results.
16 – February 18, 2023 – Takedown Requests from Government Officials to Twitter (Taibbi)
Taibbi’s frustration shows through a bit by the 16th Twitter File, where he notes that very few of the revelations of the previous 15 files were even mentioned by the mainstream media. This Twitter File takes a comical look at some of the more ridiculous takedown requests by Congresspeople of both parties.
17 – March 2, 2023 – More on the Global Engagement Center and Blacklists (Taibbi)
Taibbi returns to more hard news with Twitter File #17. The GEC that was mentioned in Twitter File 12 returns with more ridiculousness. They continue to flag accounts as “disinformation” based on flimsy criteria and evidence. This was a case where Twitter employees did their job, so the government went to the media to spread sensationalist reports of massive foreign disinformation where none existed.
18 – March 9, 2023 – The Censorship-Industrial Complex (Taibbi)
Taibbi wraps up multiple tweets by concluding that the checks-and-balances that normally should exist between government, NGOs, and private companies completely vanished as all three colluded. NGOs received government funding, government relied on the NGOs to provide lists of accounts to ban, and Twitter dutifully banned them.
19 – March 17, 2023 – The Power Wielded by Academia, NGOs, and the Government to Suppress Information (Taibbi)
On March 17, 2023, Taibbi published the 19th and last Twitter File about the “Virality Project”, a project established by Stanford University, federal agencies, and NGOs to monitor billions of social media posts.
The scope of the content being reviewed was massive and included Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest.
Its purpose was to identify content and people across all the platforms to suppress based on whether they spread vaccine “disinformation”, most of which years later proved to be completely accurate.
20. The Pfizer/White House Files (Berenson)
On September 3, 2024, Alex Berenson wrote an article further detailing how Scott Gottleib and the Biden White House coerced Twitter to ban him. Internal documents detailed how Twitter management agreed that Twitter was wrong in suspending his account in 2021, and yet Pfizer executives and Government officials pressured Twitter into banning him. Following revelations that the Biden Administration had also pressured Facebook to censor COVID-19 content, Berenson filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration.
The Aftermath of the Twitter Files
What was the public’s reaction to The Twitter Files?
A collective “ho-hum”.
The problem is, of course, that Americans don’t think. That’s not a knock on them. Like I said above, our republican (small “R”) system is designed for not thinking.
Unlike a direct democracy, where everyone votes on every small matter, a republic allows for representatives to be democratically elected by its citizens. It’s the responsibility and sacred duty of these representatives to serve the people who elected them and to “do the thinking” on their behalf.
But what do you do when your elected representatives increasingly fail to make decisions that reflect your values, when many if not most of them are influenced by deep-pocketed lobbyists, and when they do everything in their power to hold on to their power, including establishing unholy alliances with the mainstream media to act as their personal PR firms?
It’s time to take that power back. If you’ve read this far, you’ve taken the first step. Be informed. Read through all the Twitter files. Form your own opinion.
And then use your freedom of speech, your freedom of the press, and your freedom of assembly that were given to you by God to make your voice heard. Before it’s all gone.
