In late 2022, the world’s richest man, white nationalist fellow traveler and military contractor Elon Musk, purchased Twitter for $44 billion. He declared repeatedly that he would make Twitter a haven for free speech, with relatively little content moderation. After purchase, he immediately ordered the release of tens of thousands of pieces of internal company communications from Twitter’s previous ownership to a handful of handpicked journalists. These journalists then published their analysis of the documents—which became known as the Twitter Files–on Twitter threads.

In early 2023, the Republican controlled US House launched the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which devoted several hearings to receiving testimony from Twitter files journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. For the most part, the hearings featured much banal rhetoric and not much substance. In the following three paragraphs, I record some of the salient highlights of two of these hearings—on March 9^th and November 30^th— and events surrounding them.:

Republicans trumpeted the Files as proof that pre-Musk Twitter officials—often under prodding from FBI agents on the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force or academics in government funded misinformation research centers—conspired to censor the tweets of anti-vaxxers, Covid skeptics, Trump supporters, social conservatives and other salt-of the earth Americans. Shellenberger offered support for Republican claims that the Files showed severe bias against MAGA populism at Twitter prior to Musk’s ownership—as has Taibbi in other forums. Democrats dismissed these claims: all the Files showed, they said, were FBI agents and other government officials doing their proper duty of monitoring social media for signs of “fake news” launched by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and other subversive foreign actors. According to Democrats, the Files’ revelations of FBI agents privately sending requests to Twitter officials requesting censorship of tweets raised no First Amendment issues because those officials were perfectly at liberty to reject the requests (as they often did). Furthermore, Democrats said that the Files were a red herring; the real issue was the racist demagogue Donald Trump’s threat to the integrity of American democracy should he return to office.  

The subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Stacey Plaskett, and her colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz indulged in gratuitous bullying of Taibbi, dismissing him and Shellenberger as mere pawns of the sinister oligarch Elon Musk. Plaskett declared her undying support for the men and women of the FBI. With typical overkill, after the March 9^th hearing, she sent Taibbi a letter threatening him with felony perjury charges. As Taibbi testified on March 9^th, the IRS visited his home and announced an audit—giving the impression that he was a target of deep state harassment.After the hearing, subcommittee chairman Republican Jim Jordan intervened to stop the audit, earning fervent gratitude from Taibbi who lauded the MAGA Republican as “very sincere in his appreciation for the First Amendment.” 

At the November 30^th hearing, Taibbi and Shellenberger offered pious platitudes about the sanctity of the First Amendment, declaring that the answer to hate speech and misinformation on social media was not government regulation but “more speech” and vigorous debate on all issues. A third witness was Rupa Subramanya, a Canadian writer for Twitter Files journalist Bari Weiss’s publication The Free Press. Subramanya described the Canadian government’s persecution of participants in Canada’s infamous anti-vaccine mandate trucker convoy of 2022. She compared this repression with what she claimed was the Canadian government’s accommodating spirit toward pro-Palestinian protestors, whom she smeared as “peddling medieval blood-libel legends about Jews.” In response, Jim Jordan stated that Subramanya’s testimony revealed a sinister development of government censorship in Canada parallel to what the Twitter Files had revealed about the growth of a “censorship industrial complex” in the United States.

The Twitter Files Journalists and Elon Musk

Understandably, many leftists, seeing right-wing drivel of the sort spouted by Jordan and Subramanya associated with the Twitter Files, have, with some exceptions, been quick to dismiss them. Indeed, on the surface the Files have many problematic aspects. Files journalists functioned as brand ambassadors (aiming especially at conservatives) for the new Twitter under Musk’s ownership. They portrayed the old Twitter as containing everything Musk was going to eliminate– discrimination against “anti-woke” conservative speech and heavy government surveillance of content. Although unpaid, the journalists received increased exposure for their own writing projects and other aspects of their personal brands. In return, the journalists often spoke of Elon Musk in highly complementary terms, including, most disappointingly, Matt Taibbi. Taibbi, the progressive journalist known for exposing injustices perpetrated by powerful people like Musk, expressed disinterest in the oligarch’s anti-union record and other abuses of workers—as well as Musk’s cooperation with the Indian government to censor Narendra Modi’s critics on Twitter. “I like Elon Musk” Taibbi told Mehdi Hassan when confronted about these issues on MSNBC in April. Taibbi and Musk later had a falling out over Musk’s decision to restrict the posting of links on Twitter to Substack (where Taibbi edits Racket News, his main source of income).

The Twitter Files Journalists’ Politics

Nearly all the Files journalists selected by Musk politically lean to the right. Like Musk, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger are fervent defenders of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. Shellenberger holds a faculty position at the University of Austin, the unaccredited “anti-woke” institution founded by Weiss which is scheduled to hold its first classes in Fall 2024. Besides being a specialist in methods of resistance to the “religion of wokeism,” Shellenberger is also known as an advocate of nuclear power, free market “environmentalism” and crackdowns on the homeless. Weiss publishes The Free Press, a website noted for transphobia.

Then there is Taibbi. Long known for his books and Rolling Stone pieces attacking corruption and injustice in American politics and Wall Street, Taibbi still retains some of his old aura as a left-liberal populist muckraker. Unlike Shellenberger and Weiss, he is a critic of Israel although he has mentioned the subject infrequently throughout his career. However, recently, he has aligned with the MAGA right on key issues. 

In addition to his ethically questionable participation in the elaborate marketing exercise for Elon Musk’s Twitter that was the Twitter Files, he has also enthusiastically aligned with the right wing’s campaign against cancel culture. In the struggle against cancel culture, Taibbi has developed friendly association with such intellectually or morally substandard persons as Covid skeptics, Tucker Carlson, Brett Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Robert F Kennedy Jr. He has praised as iconoclastic Matt Walsh’s transphobic documentary What is a Woman? (“a sarcastic doc that gently tinkles in the face of transgender orthodoxies.”) Critics of his Twitter Files work, like Mehdi Hassan, have noted major errors and exaggerations in it.

Taibbi has denounced Donald Trump as a racist and pathological liar. But he has also argued that the American media has unfairly stereotyped Trump voters as racist. In fact, Trump’s election in 2016—regardless of Trump himself being a conman—was a genuine revolt by voters against economic inequality and political corruption. He is an advocate of the highly problematic horseshoe theory of politics: that Bernie Sanders supporters and Trump supporters should unite because they supposedly share many of the same populist concerns. Taibbi reiterated his theme of MAGA as a genuine populist current in an article on Substack last month, co-written with Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag. In the piece, the authors discussed the documents leaked to them by a source within a group of US and UK military contractors called the Cyber-Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). They explained that the documents revealed the extent of plotting by elements of the American ruling class against the populist revolt represented by Trump’s election. The censorship of pro-MAGA speech at Twitter revealed in the Twitter Files was only one part of a broader elite counteroffensive against MAGA populism. The documents showed that “after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ‘information warfare’ and counterterrorism tactics designed to combat foreign threats were turned against the domestic population.”

Twitter Files Topic Selection

The cases presented by the Twitter Files overwhelmingly revolved around suppression of conservative friendly speech at Twitter in the years before Musk assumed ownership. There was the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter after January 6^th. There was the de-amplification, for unclear reasons, of the tweets of the right-wing demagogues Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino and the Covid skeptic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; and the multiple account suspensions of the anti-LGBTQ site Libs of Tik Tok. Also heavily belabored was Twitter’s ban (for one day) of links to the initial New York Post Story about the Hunter Biden laptop weeks before the 2020 election. This ban appeared to be an overreaction by Twitter officials after prior prodding by FBI agents to be aware of potential “hack-and-leak” operations on Twitter launched by Russian agents or other evil actors. Another was an e-mail request on January 23, 2021 from Biden White House official Clarke Humphrey for Twitter to remove a tweet by Robert F Kennedy Jr (which quoted Jay Bhattacharya). Twitter officials rejected this request on the ground that the tweet did not violate Twitter’s Terms of Service.  

In contrast, the well-known suppression of Palestinian voices on Twitter before and after Musk assumed ownership received no attention in the Twitter Files. As noted above, principal Twitter Files journalists are extreme Zionists. When,at the above-mentioned November 30^th Weaponization subcommittee hearing, Republican Darrell Issa invited Taibbi and Shellenberger to speak about the state of free speech since the 10/7 massacres, both immediately pivoted to other topics. To be fair, in late October Shellenberger expressed opposition on Public, his Substack site, to several instances of censorship of pro-Palestinian voices at American universities and in Europe. In the same article he also alleged idiotically that the US media gave heavy coverage to censorship of pro-Palestinian voices at the expense of Twitter Files revelations about suppression of conservative speech.

As 2022 ended and the Twitter Files were at the height of their media attention, Twitter suspended the account of famed Palestinian journalist Said Arikat for three and a half weeks for no clear reason, with no apparent interest from Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleagues.

The latter likewise made no public comment when, during the same period, Musk’s Twitter suspended multiple left-wing accounts which had been smeared as violence prone and antifa linked by the far-right provocateur Andy Ngo.

In addition, the Twitter Files provided rare slight traces of evidence about a 2018 Twitter purge of left-wing accounts linked to the Occupy movement but nothing like the comprehensive attention paid to such conservative friendly stories as the suppression of the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden laptop.

To be fair, Democratic critics of the Twitter Files and–with a few exceptions—liberal media critics of the Twitter Files also took no note of the absence of these issues.

The Twitter Files: The Way Forward

For all their exaggerations and right-wing slant, the Twitter Files journalists were right in one major way. They were correct that officials of the federal government, along with government funded anti-misinformation research centers, have worked behind the scenes with social media companies to shape the latter’s moderation policies in ways that lack transparency and democratic oversight.

In recent years, Taibbi has done compelling work, including in at least one Twitter Files thread, about the vastly overblown hysteria about Russian bots spreading fake news. The Russian misinformation hysteria, of course, has been a prime moving force in the vastly increased government monitoring of social media content in recent years. In an important November 2018 Rolling Stone article, Taibbi reported about one of Facebook’s periodic purges of many pages supposedly exhibiting signs of “inauthentic behavior.”  Many authentic progressive as well as right wing pages were caught up in the dragnet.

In the Rolling Stone piece, Taibbi noted that there were alternative policies to combatting the fake news problem apart from the path that was chosen (an opaque partnership between government and Big Tech):

“We could have responded to the fake-news problem in a hundred different ways. We could have used European style laws to go after Silicon Valley’s rapacious data collection schemes that incentivize clickbait and hyper-partisanship. We could have used anti-trust laws to tackle monopolistic companies that wield too much electoral influence. We could have recognized [social media companies] as public utilities, making algorithms for things like Google searches and Facebook news feed transparent…”

In the aftermath of the Twitter Files, calls for reform of government regulation of social media have usually been much more modest than most of the measures listed above by Taibbi, usually revolving around proposed revisions to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.  Some Republicans want to enact legislation severely restricting government involvement in social media content moderation as well as restrictions on social media companies from moderating content altogether. Democrats want to remove laws shielding social media companies from liability for any consequence arising from hate speech or misinformation on their sites. Both sides have made noise about making social media algorithms more transparent.

Taibbi has offered very little on the subject of social media reform since the Twitter Files launched in late 2022–he has not suggested, as he did in Rolling Stone in 2018, that social media companies be made public utilities or be subjected to anti-trust action. It would seem incongruous for Taibbi to advocate such policies after cooperating in highly friendly fashion with a social media company owner, the billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, in the publication of the Twitter Files. As mentioned above, Taibbi and Musk eventually had a falling out over Musk’s restriction of links to Substack articles on Twitter. At the same time, since the Twitter Files publication, Taibbi has closely cooperated in multiple writing projects with Michael Shellenberger, an obsequious right wing defender of Musk’s ownership of Twitter and obviously unsupportive of progressive reform of social media. Taibbi has also developed a close working relationship with Substack co-founder and former Elon Musk publicist Hamish McKenzie and been lauded by another right wing Silicon Valley oligarch, the near billionaire David Sacks. 

In the mainstream debate on the Twitter Files, one thing stands out clearly.  Everyone accepts the premise that social media companies should remain under the control of private corporations. Nobody advocates for proposals for bringing social media under democratic control—like those discussed in the final chapter of socialist academic Rob Larson’s 2020 book Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley. Larson’s proposals for socializing social media (and the rest of the internet) and organizing social media users to act collectively in their own interests could provide a way forward for enhancing free speech by taking it out of the hands of corporate content moderators.

In a functioning democratic society, engaged citizens would be able to sift out the sensible from the nonsense in the Twitter Files and use it as part of a push for greater democratic control of society. Of course, as Z readers are aware, the United States is a long way off from being a functioning democratic society.

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