Twitter files should bother liberal critics of Elon Musk and here’s why | Kenan Malik

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Half the room hops up and down shouting Gotcha!. The other half shrugs and mutters So what’s up?. Welcome to the war against so-called Twitter files.

Over the past month, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made available to a select group of journalists internal documents and conversations that took place before his takeover. It’s mostly about discussions of who and what should be moderated or banned, ranging from the history of Hunter Biden’s laptop to whether to remove Donald Trump from the platform. Journalists released selected slices of the data via a drip feed of Twitter feeds.

For some, the Twitter files provide evidence of collusion between tech companies, liberal politicians and the Deep State to silence conservatives. For others, they are little more than a publicity exercise that tells us nothing we don’t know. As someone who has long championed the importance of free speech, I think we should take the Twitter files seriously, but also view the discussion with a skeptical eye, given that much of it is framed by culture wars.

Consider the shadow ban controversy. It’s a widely used phrase in social media debates, but its meaning is disputed. For curators of the Twitter files, shadow banning means using algorithms to de-amplify tweets, that is, to prevent them from reaching a wider audience.

For the old pre-Musk Twitterer, however, it meant something different deliberately making someone’s content untraceable to anyone but the person who posted it, as a 2018 blog post put it. Conflicting definitions have allowed critics to accuse former Twitter executives of lying, though they seem as much interested in putting Twitter’s old regime in the dock as finding out the truth.

The curating journalists of the Twitter Files presented the deamplification as a secret process. Certainly, the internal mechanisms of moderation have been veiled in secrecy. As a practice, however, Twitter has long been open about de-emphasis or viewability filtering, as it also calls for it by even noting in its terms of service that we may limit the distribution or viewability of any content.

This is a practice championed not only by the old Twitter, but also by the new Twitter. Shortly after buying the platform, Musk tweeted that his policy would be free speech, but not free access, adding that negative/hateful tweets would be deboosted to the max, in other words. terms, deamplified.

But is it a good policy? Who decides who or what should be deamplified? According to what criteria? And how is this different from simple censorship? Unfortunately, the polarization of the debate seems to have taken precedence over a nuanced debate around these questions.

Within Twitter, Musk tweeted, the rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left. Photography: Dado Ruvi/Reuters

The Twitter files also reveal some of the processes by which users are banned. Twitter insists it does not suspend accounts for political reasons. It’s hard to reconcile with the evidence.

Take the Trump controversy. Twitter executives have had anguished discussions about how to deal with the president, acknowledging the dangers of banning a democratically elected leader. Nevertheless, as one leader put it, the winning narrative [sic] and his friends have been suing in this election and frankly the last 4 years have to be reckoned with. In other words, Trump’s politics mattered. After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, pressure on Twitter caused the second argument to take precedence over the first.

All of this has reinforced the view that the tech corporate right is fomenting a liberal conspiracy against conservatives. Within Twitter, Musk tweeted, the rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left.

Yet a 2021 study suggested otherwise. By examining millions of tweets in seven countries, Britain, America, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan, researchers found that with the exception of Germany , Twitter’s algorithms amplified right-wing politicians more than left-wing ones. They also found that in America, conservative news sources were more stimulated than liberal ones.

These results run counter to popular belief. There may be a clear difference between algorithmic decisions and those made by human moderators. It may also be that the high-profile censorship of right-wing voices is not representative of the bulk of decisions. In the last six months of 2021 alone, Twitter censored an extraordinary 4 million tweets, a number that in itself should give us pause. The political bias in these 4 million decisions is unknown. There is little discussion, for example, of the suppression of Palestinian voices, a practice that has continued under Musk.

At the very least, we need more transparency about moderation. Yet when Alex Stamos of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory asked Musk to allow not just hand-picked journalists, but also academic researchers, to inspect the data, Musk fired him. on the strange grounds that you are operating a propaganda platform. Musk seems more interested in being seen as owning the libraries than opening up the inner workings of Twitter.

The most concerning issue that the Twitter files revealed is the level of contact between the social media company and state security organizations. The FBI regularly holds meetings with Twitter executives, urging them to take action against misinformation, even when it was just a satirical tweet, and demanding users’ personal data. Twitter, to its credit, often pushed back. Nevertheless, the Twitter files show an unhealthy relationship between social media and state security.

Equally unhealthy is the response of many liberals who have become optimistic about the work of the security apparatus. There has been a remarkable partisan shift in American attitudes toward the FBI, with a huge swing in Democratic support for the organization. Many now see the FBI as a key weapon against populism. Many seem to have forgotten the FBI’s sordid history of undermining radical movements from labor unions to civil rights organizations. The recklessness of liberals and many on the left in the face of such state interference in public life is worrying.

Twitter, we are constantly told, is not real life. That is true. But, like all social media, it plays a disproportionately large role in real life, a private enterprise that has become an intimate part of the global public square. We need to keep this public square as open as possible. That’s why the Twitter Files revelations matter. And that’s why we need to understand their meaning beyond the clamor of the culture wars.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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