The Twitter Files should disturb liberal critics
of Elon Musk – and here’s why
Kenan Malik
Leaked messages show an unhealthy link between social
media and state security
Sun 1 Jan
2023 07.00 GMT
Half the
room is jumping up and down, screaming “Gotcha!”. The other half shrugs its
shoulders, muttering “So what’s new?”. Welcome to the war over the so-called
Twitter Files.
Over the
past month, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made available to a handpicked
group of journalists internal documents and conversations that took place
before his takeover. They are mainly discussions about who and what should be
moderated or banned, ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to the question
of whether to remove Donald Trump from the platform. The journalists have made
public selected slices of the data through a drip feed of Twitter threads.
For some,
the Twitter Files provide evidence of collusion between tech companies, liberal
politicians and the “deep state” to silence conservatives. For others, they
constitute little more than a publicity exercise that told us nothing that we
did not know. As someone who has long made a case for the importance of free
speech, I think we should take the Twitter Files seriously, but also look at
the discussion with a sceptical eye, given that much of it is framed by the
culture wars.
Consider
the controversy over “shadow banning”. It’s a phrase much bandied about in
debates about social media, but its meaning is contested. For the curators of
the Twitter Files, “shadow banning” means using algorithms to “deamplify”
tweets – that is, stop them reaching a wider audience.
For the old
pre-Musk Twitter, however, it meant something different – “deliberately making
someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it”,
as a 2018 blog post put it. The conflicting definitions have allowed the
critics to accuse former Twitter executives of lying, although they seem as
interested in putting the old Twitter regime in the dock as in uncovering the
truth.
The
journalists curating the Twitter Files have presented 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
deamplification – or “visibility filtering” as it also calls it – noting even
in its terms of service that “we may… limit distribution or visibility of any
Content”.
It’s a
practice championed not just by old Twitter but new Twitter, too. Shortly after
buying the platform, Musk tweeted that his policy would be one of “freedom of
speech, but not freedom of reach”, adding that “negative/hate tweets will be
max deboosted” – in other words, deamplified.
But is it a
good policy? Who decides who or what should be “deamplified”? By what criteria?
And how different is this from straightforward censorship? Unfortunately, the
polarisation of the debate seems to have overridden a nuanced debate around
such questions.
The Twitter
Files also reveal some of the processes by which users are banned. Twitter
insists that it does not suspend accounts for “political reasons”. That’s hard
to square with the evidence.
Take the
controversy over Trump. Twitter executives held anguished discussions about how
to deal with the president, recognising the dangers of banning a democratically
elected leader. Nevertheless, as one executive put it, “the narrative that
trump [sic] and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and
frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account”. In other words, Trump’s
politics mattered. After the 6 January riot at the Capitol, the pressure that
Twitter faced led to the second argument taking precedence over the first.
All this
has strengthened the view on the right of tech companies as fomenting a liberal
conspiracy against conservatives. Within Twitter, Musk tweeted, “rules were
enforced against the right, but not against the left”.
Yet a 2021
study suggested the opposite. Looking at millions of tweets in seven countries
– Britain, America, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan – researchers
found that, with the exception of Germany, Twitter algorithms amplified
rightwing politicians more than the left. They also found that in America,
conservative news sources were boosted more than liberal ones.
These
results cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. It may be that there’s a
sharp divide between algorithmic decisions and those made by human moderators.
It may also be that the high-profile censoring of rightwing voices is not
representative of the mass of decisions. In the last six months of 2021 alone,
Twitter censored an extraordinary 4m tweets – a figure that itself should give
us pause. The political bias in those 4m decisions is unknown. There is little
discussion, for instance, about 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
handpicked journalists but academic researchers to inspect the data, Musk
dismissed him on the bizarre grounds that “you operate a propaganda platform”.
Musk seems more interested in being seen to “own the libs” than in opening up
Twitter’s inner workings.
The most
worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between
the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly
holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against
“misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical
tweet, and demanding the personal data of users. Twitter, to its credit, often
pushed back. Nevertheless, the Twitter Files do show an unhealthy relationship
between social media and state security.
Equally
unhealthy is the response of many liberals who have become sanguine about the
work of the security apparatus. There has been a remarkable partisan shift in
American attitudes towards the FBI, with a huge swing in Democratic support for
the organisation. Many now view the FBI as an essential weapon against
populism. Many seem to have forgotten the sordid history of the FBI in
undermining radical movements from unions to civil rights organisations. The
insouciance of liberals and many on the left to such state interference in
public life is disquieting.
Twitter, we
are constantly told, is not real life. That’s true. But, like all social media,
it plays an inordinately large role in real life, a private company that has
become an intimate part of the global public square. We need to keep that
public square as open as possible. That is why the revelations of the Twitter
Files matter. And that is why we need to understand their significance beyond
the clamour of the culture wars.
Kenan Malik
is an Observer columnist
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