An early December, a handful of American journalists began publishing the so-called Twitter Files. What exactly is meant by this is not entirely clear to this day. The name places the reports in the tradition of leaked classified information, but they differ categorically from documents like the “Facebook Papers”. It’s not just because Twitter boss Elon Musk publishes them as the new boss on an official mission, but above all because of the strange publication strategy. Apparently, Musk personally selected journalists who corresponded to his political stance; and who, unfortunately, also strictly adhere to Musk’s thesis that the previous management of Twitter manipulated the public discourse, tending to serve liberal interests.
If you want, you can find evidence for this suspicion in the documents that the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang been processing for weeks – last was Alex Berenson dran, who was blocked on Twitter for half a year because of false information about Covid-19. Because not all blocks or interventions by those responsible are understandable, this also applies to the suspension of Donald Trump’s account, which was closed on January 9, 2021 after his supporters attacked the Capitol, without this being caused by a particularly bad tweet would. But anyone who senses the conspiracy behind it that Musk alleges will find in the excerpts of the published chats above all evidence of how eagerly the decision was discussed internally. The other stories that Musk’s contract writers stage as major scandals are similarly flabby. Unless you think it’s a problem that the FBI would occasionally alert Twitter’s chief of security to accounts that were posting questionable content. The fact that Twitter blocked the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s business contacts in Ukraine was described as a “total mistake” by former boss Jack Dorsey two years ago; Even Musk’s task force found no evidence for the American right’s favorite theory, which has been rehashed again, that the text was suppressed by order of the authorities.
