The “Twitter files” continued to drop as we here at Mad Mondays were resting up over Christmas. For those who missed it, these documents are mostly internal correspondence between Twitter execs and employees before the company was bought by Elon Musk. Musk has been releasing the documents to independent journalists who have been publishing summaries of the content.
The FBI and defenders of its surveilling say that the whole affair is a nothing-burger, and anyway, the Bureau is an equal-opportunity meddler, claiming it has always engaged with lots of corporations. But Kevin Downey Jr., a writer for PJ Media, believes that whether that is normal operating procedure or not, normies should pay attention. Downey highlights some of the wildest revelations including that the FBI paid Twitter to censor specific posts and accounts, pressured the platform to hand over information which would usually require a warrant, and that several agencies were surveilling Americans using special backdoor portals. Mark Hemingway offered similar thoughts at The Federalist, pointing out that intelligence agencies often place their people in regular workplaces to work as double agents, if you will.
In many ways, these files simply confirm what most wide-awake folks already suspected – that the social media platform censored speech, often at the behest of political agents. Pharma execs requested that debate over vaccines and natural immunity was quashed. Politicians asked for troublesome journalists to be silenced. Twitter bosses tweaked the rules to de-platform the sitting president.
Journalist Matt Taibbi offered his reflections on the surreal nature of the situation. He speaks of his relief knowing the gaslighting was real, that he is not a crazy person for thinking he was being sold a bill of goods. He sees this release of documents as “a road map back to something like reality…This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling.”
Perhaps the whole thing is a tempest in a teacup and maybe nothing will come of it. We aren’t putting our trust in billionaires or journalists. We aren’t surprised at the schemes of powerful men. But when lies are exposed, that is something we can rejoice about.