The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, Alex Berenson, and Paul D. Thacker shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads. After the first set of files was published, various technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias. A major aspect of the examination surrounded false assertions by Musk and others that Twitter had been ordered by the government to help presidential candidate Joe Biden in the coming election by suppressing an October 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. Researcher Matt Taibbi found no evidence of government involvement in Twitter's decision to initially withhold the story. In a June 2023 court filing, Twitter attorneys strongly denied that the Files showed the government had coerced the company to censor content, as Musk and many Republicans claimed. Former Twitter employees asserted that Republican officials also made takedown requests so often that Twitter had to keep a database tracking them. Internal Twitter emails showed the company allowed accounts operated by the U.S. military to run a Middle East influence campaign; some accounts were kept on the platform for years before being taken down. The releases prompted debate over the nature of blacklisting, vows for congressional investigation, calls for the full release of all documents for the sake of transparency, and calls to improve content moderation processes at Twitter.
Background The inner workings of Twitter's content moderation systems were not well known to the public, on the basis that knowledge of the details could enable manipulation. But American conservatives had long contended that Twitter used its moderation policies to muzzle conservative views. On November 28, 2022, a month after Musk officially acquired Twitter, Musk announced that he planned to release a portion of Twitter's internal documents related to "free speech suppression", adding, "The public deserves to know what really happened" under Twitter's prior leadership. Musk subsequently gave a series of internal Twitter documents—including screenshots, emails, and chat logs—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 stated that the only condition she and her reporting team agreed to was that the material would be first published on Twitter. Musk later stated he had not read the documents before their release to Taibbi and Weiss. On December 6, Musk fired James Baker, deputy general counsel at Twitter, for allegedly vetting the information before it was passed on to Taibbi and Weiss and providing an explanation that Musk found "unconvincing." Taibbi said that the planned publication of Twitter's internal documents related to its handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story had been delayed because of Baker's vetting. Baker had previously been general counsel for the FBI and investigated Russian interference into the 2016 election.
Topics In his prelude, Taibbi stated that the files told a "Frankenstein tale of a human-built mechanism"—"one of the world's largest and most influential social media platforms"—"grown out [of] the control of its designer". Taibbi wrote that these documents, as well as the assessment of "multiple current and former high-level executives", demonstrate how, although external requests for moderation from both political parties were received and honored, an overwhelmingly left-wing employee base at Twitter facilitated a left-leaning bias. The first installment included content related to Twitter's moderation process regarding a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story. The second installment addressed what Musk and others have described as the shadow banning of some users. The third installment highlighted events within Twitter leading to President Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter. The fourth installment covered how Twitter employees reacted to the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the conflict within Twitter on how to moderate tweets and users supporting the attack. The fifth installment covered how Twitter employees influenced the decision to ban Trump from the platform. The sixth installment described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against several accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation. The seventh installment showed Twitter's interaction with the intelligence community around the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop. The eighth installment showed the Twitter Site Integrity Team whitelisted accounts from United States Central Command (CENTCOM) used to run online influence campaigns in other countries.
No. 1: Content moderation of New York Post story
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