The smouldering ruins of the Twitter Files

Elon Musk, the world’s smartest guy according to many of the world’s dumbest guys, has been having a characteristically normal one lately, providing a rich and ever-evolving answer to the question, “What would happen if the world’s richest man organised his worldview around the intellectual content of decade-old memes?”

Now we know: it’s the Twitter logo briefly replaced with a Shiba Inu “Dogecoin” symbol. It’s all media inquiries being met with an automated turd emoji. It’s Musk’s announcement today that the long-delayed policy of stripping Twitter verification badges from users who won’t pay for them will finally be completed on “4/20”. Hell yeah, blaze it!

Alongside this is the public collapse of the much-hyped Twitter Files. For the mercifully uninitiated, the Twitter Files is a series of Twitter threads put together by handpicked journalists who were granted access to the company’s internal documents following Musk’s takeover. The move was in response to complaints of a censorious left-wing bias on the platform, the kind of thing free speech warrior Musk promised to stamp out.

Lo and behold, one of those journalists, Matt Taibbi, argued that their work illustrated how staff at the “world’s largest and most influential social media platform” would “control” and “manipulate speech” at the behest of “connected actors” (government figures, invariably associated with the left, reinforcing the platform’s anti-conservative censorship) before Musk’s blessed takeover.

As Cam Wilson put it, the project did reveal some interesting realities of how a major communications platform deals with the responsibilities and pressures of its public role. However:

The problem is that these documents have been completely misconstrued and decontextualised in a way that makes them deeply misleading to most readers. The Twitter Files promised proof of big tech and the deep state working hand in hand to control the public debate. What it actually shows is how Musk’s Twitter is clumsily trying to do the same thing and, in doing so, is harnessing some of the darkest energy of the internet.

In recent weeks, the whole thing has come crashing down.

Last week, there was the 20-minute interview Taibbi had with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan, not so much a car crash as the end of The Blue Brothers. For a representative sample of how it went, Hassan pointed out, among many serious errors in Taibbi’s reporting, that:

You say they labelled 22 million tweets as misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 vote — they didn’t. They flagged 3000 election misinformation tweets for labelling, so you were only 21,997,000 off.

This wasn’t the end of the public indignities endured by Taibbi and other journos who worked on the files. After Substack, the newsletter platform that many high-profile journalists (including Taibbi) rely on to share their work and make a living, introduced a “notes” feature that operates similarly to Twitter, Musk decided to essentially choke the service out.

Substack users could no longer embed tweets in their Substack posts, and Twitter users found they could no longer retweet, like, “pin” or engage with posts that contained links to Substack articles, or posts by Substack’s official Twitter account.

Taibbi announced he was leaving Twitter in protest, and Musk, ever gracious, shared and then deleted personal texts he’d exchanged with Taibbi.

Most, but not all, of the restrictions on Substack have since been lifted, but hilariously, Musk appears to have huffily unfollowed Taibbi, along with the other high-profile journalists who worked on and promoted Musk’s Twitter Files: unqualified climate change contrarian turned unqualified investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger and free speech absolutist (except when it comes to Arab academics) Bari Weiss.