The files don't show how the platform works in a bad way; instead, they show a philosophy of 'transparency for you, but not for me.'
The "Twitter Files" are like cosplay for journalism. They try to look like the real thing, and sometimes they do. Though I shouldn't be so mean to cosplayers: they bring joy and beauty to public life, while the Twitter Files are just giving people like QAnon and others who are addicted to viral outrage something to chow down on. The latest round, which was put together by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, was meant to show that Twitter did indeed do the feared "shadowbanning" of far-right accounts by hiding them from the general public in an act of "woke" censorship done at the highest levels.
But Weiss said both less and more than she wanted and helped confirm what should have been clear after Matt Taibbi's first round of Twitter Files posts: The fake scandals that this PR-friendly access to Twitter's internal systems is said to have uncovered give the impression of transparency, but under Musk's leadership, there isn't any.
Part of the problem is how the word "shadowban" is used. People now use the word to mean whatever they want it to mean, just like they use the word "woke" to mean whatever they want it to mean. This has let Musk's right-wing fans use an old tweet from Twitter HQ that flatly denied shadowbanning as a "gotcha" game. "But, aha!" they seem to say, "brave reporter Bari Weiss has shown that this is not true." Weiss took advantage of this on purpose when she said, "What many people call "shadowbanning," Twitter executives and employees call "visibility filtering," or VF," and implied that her sources said it was the same thing.
But all she did was show that Twitter did what it had always said it did. First of all, "visibility filtering" includes everything, even filtering made by users. If you have blocked or muted someone, they have been "filtered for visibility" for you. This is a term used in the business world. It also talks about how tweets from accounts that have been suspended would be hidden from the public. Weiss picks and chooses quotes from a 2018 blog post on Twitter by former trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde and former product lead Kayvon Beykpour in which they said, "People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not."
The problem for the crowd is that this post has more words. Gadde and Beykpour gave a clear definition of shadowbanning: "making someone's content unfindable to everyone but the person who posted it, without the knowledge of the person who posted it." They said that this wasn't done, and nothing in the Twitter Files shows that they were wrong. Musk fans have said that this is just sneaky wordplay. But, to my surprise, this blog post still has more words. To be specific: "We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it's about things that are happening right now. These ranking models look at a lot of different signals to figure out how to best organize tweets based on how relevant they are right now. We must also deal with people who don't have good intentions and try to manipulate or stop healthy conversation.
This ranking is explained in more detail with examples and a FAQ about a recent incident in which some Republican politicians, as well as some Democratic politicians and a whole lot of other non-conservatives, were temporarily unable to be autosuggested through search. That was fixed quickly, but Gadde and Beykpour were clear that Twitter has always ranked and filtered based on a number of factors and always would. In other words, what Weiss "found" was something that Twitter already knew about and admitted to more than four years ago. Even Twitter's terms of service say so.
In short, no one's tweets were hidden from the public without the person who posted them knowing. If they were suspended or banned, they would know, of course. De-amplification is a bit different because it affects a person's ranking in search results and other places. Some might say it's "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach."
Musk and his shills are playing semantic games when they pretend to be open while glossing over a number of important issues. Matt Taibbi said that the Trump administration asked Twitter for things all the time, but we don't know what those requests were, which ones were done, or why. Weiss found out that the transphobic account Libs of TikTok was getting special treatment. No moderation decisions could be made about the account without consulting higher-ups, which is a privilege that very few accounts on the platform have. This was probably done to avoid upsetting the loud online right. Why?
But more than that, since Musk came to work there has been no way to see how he makes decisions. What happened to his emails? When can we find out more about how he's made many decisions about content moderation all by himself? When will we be able to check that what he says in public matches what he says in private? When will we find out how important decisions were made about staffing? The answer is probably never, if nothing is done to stop it.
Musk's "Potemkin transparency" is just a way to make him look good by making up fake scandals about Twitter's former leadership (whom, it must be noted, he has made rather rich with his purchase). It gives the false impression that Twitter is a dictatorship that Musk overthrew to the cheers of a huge crowd. This is the main goal of the whole thing, even though it also helps the right wing's politics of never-ending complaints and self-pity. For the right-wing populists, it's a Zeno's paradox of a conspiracy, because the final truth is just one more viral Twitter thread away.
People are hard to take seriously when they say they don't like how Twitter was run by a group of people with titles and management responsibilities who made management decisions, but then they cheer when those tasks are put in the hands of one man. Musk doesn't offer transparency; he offers caprice. The content moderation policy is based on his strange whims, which we have to take at his word because there is no way to appeal or hold him accountable. It's hard to believe that anyone could think this is a good thing.
This is like the bigger lie that Musk's fans tell about the takeover: that he has somehow freed the company and made it more democratic and answerable. But in terms of how a company is run, he has moved from the oligarchic democracy of a publicly traded company, which was required by law to tell the public a lot of things, to a personalist dictatorship.
He wants to be free from having to answer to anyone. He's not freeing "the people"; he's freeing himself. By making Twitter private, he made sure he wouldn't have to answer to shareholders or a board and could say only what he wanted. In a move that was typical of him, he gave stenographers who shared his beliefs full access to Twitter's tools so they could spread a message he liked. He then sent an email to his staff threatening them with legal action if they ever leaked anything. Transparency, to be sure. Musk wants to live in a world where no one ever says "no" to him. Too many of his fans have the same selfish dream.
People who praise Musk online, especially his new group of right-wing posters, are the kind of people whose every accusation is a confession or a goal. Rest assured that they want to do to their many ideological enemies exactly what they have falsely accused Twitter of doing. In fact, it's already happening, but there's no way to find out why, and there's no clear TOS violation to point to. Every step he takes makes a joke out of the idea of being honest. Does the public worry that Musk's plan to get rid of content moderation teams and CSAM teams in particular will lead to more of this kind of hateful content? Just say that your former coworkers covered up for pedophiles when they didn't. Right-wing populists who believe in QAnon conspiracies will cheer you on. You'll look like a revolutionary, but things will keep getting worse.
Musk's promise to make Twitter's VF more visible to end users by telling them if they're being deranked and why could be the only good thing to come out of this mess. I'd like this, but it's just another promise from Musk. As with everything else, you have to watch what he does, not what he tweets. And what he's doing is a sign that things are going in a scary way.
The people who liked Musk the most lived in a dystopia they had made up in their own minds. Now, they want payback for what they think was a slight. It won't look good.
