15.12.2022

G-man behind the curtain

Scandal or nothingburger? Paul Demarty assesses the ‘Twitter files’ and the continued travails of Elon Musk

Whatever Elon Musk’s shortcomings, he has something of a flair for the dramatic.

His reluctant reign as Twitter owner and CEO began with mass layoffs, and proceeded to loyalty oaths, chaotic product launches, advertiser boycotts and decision-making by plebiscite. The site has not fallen over and died just yet, and so has been a rich source of entertainment.

His latest gambit is, on the face of it, most interesting of all - he has granted a hand-picked selection of journalists access to the email and Slack archives. These hacks are spelunking through this vast corpus of material to tell the inside story of whatever controversies they fancy.

The various ‘Twitter files’ dumps so far cover, first of all, the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden hard drive leak and other sensitive stories in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election; the routine use of algorithmic tooling to reduce the reach of controversial users; and the chain of events leading to Donald Trump’s suspension from the platform. Musk’s hired hands in this endeavour so far are Matt Taibbi, the veteran muckraking journalist who has drifted to the right in recent years; Bari Weiss, a liberal-Zionist creep who cancelled herself from the staff of the New York Times; and Michael Shellenberger, a right-wing writer best known for opposing the mainstream green movement. According to Taibbi, there was only one condition for such access - any stories would initially be presented in full on Twitter (which, unfortunately, has an utterly unsuitable interface for such things).¹

There is a common political thread to these people - all are a particularly modern species of right-wing or right-adjacent public figure, neither bible-thumping bigots nor libertarians of the old school, per the traditional US Republican coalition, but deeply alienated from mainstream liberalism. Another such figure would be Musk himself, once admired in centrist liberal circles, as tech billionaires typically were, for his ambitious, cosmopolitan companies, but now an open ally of various reactionary lunatics. (His most famous active venture, after all, is an electric vehicle company that, it is fair to say, largely created the EV market single-handedly - very eco-friendly.)

Therefore, the response to the revelations is unsurprisingly polarised. For right-wingers, it is scandalous confirmation of bias against them. Liberals (and most leftists) instead argue, one way or another, that there’s nothing in it all - a ‘nothingburger’ - and focus instead on denouncing Musk’s helpmeets as craven and corrupted by a billionaire. As is usually the case with these things, both factions have a point, and both have something to hide.

To take the liberals and moderates first, they are right that there is nothing surprising as such in this stuff. We have learned that Twitter promoted the line that the Hunter Biden story came from Russian active measures when they had no reason whatsoever to believe such a thing. One of the people involved in that decision, deputy general counsel Jim Baker, joined Twitter straight from the FBI, and a running theme in all the disclosures is the close relationship between Twitter and various three-letter agencies. Beyond that, many prominent conservatives were ‘shadowbanned’ (that is, the reach of their tweets was reduced without actually suspending their accounts); and the reasoning for banning Donald Trump’s account was wholly artificial. None of these revelations are at all surprising, although it is very good to have documentary evidence of them.

That said, something does not have to be surprising to be reprehensible. It is not surprising that a strategically important social network obeys the dictates of the deep state. Yet that fact is hidden from users. In the same way, of course people who want a successful social network massage the algorithm to quarantine fascist-adjacent ranters from ‘normal’ users and (more importantly) advertisers. That did not force top Twitter people like Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth to lie through their teeth that such mechanisms did not exist. It is kettle logic: “your complaints of censorship are paranoid lunacy; and what’s more, you deserve to be censored!”

Liberal abandon

For liberals to take such a line is not surprising, at least given the recent sharply authoritarian turn of American society in general, which in its liberal form consists of the total abandonment of free speech as a value altogether. The left should have no truck with it: to accept the contemporary liberal framing of free expression needing to be ‘balanced’ with purported harms is, inevitably, to accept the right of organisations like the FBI to decide which speech is ‘harmful’. Musk, Taibbi, Weiss and friends have done us a favour by making that fact starkly obvious.

That does, however, leave the question of their own bona fides. In particular, our focus turns to Musk: what the hell is his game plan here?

Twitter has not been a pretty sight since he took over, to be sure. The mass firings, the relentless shifts in aims (remember when, for all of five minutes, he was going to turn it into a payments platform?), the revenue crisis caused by advertising boycotts - the safe money remains that he does not fundamentally know what he is doing. He retains a legion of vexatious superfans who think he can do no wrong; and a larger circle of embittered conservatives who dream he will be the means of their revenge against the hated woke liberals. Beyond these layers, it is generally agreed that Twitter - long stagnant and wasteful under previous leadership, but basically ticking along - is in a state of permanent crisis at this point.

More pertinently, given the basic contours of the Twitter files controversy, it must be noted that Musk has flatly reneged on his promises to essentially adhere to a first amendment standard for speech on the platform - promises which were always as obviously dishonest as those of Gadde and Roth that shadowbanning was not a thing, but there is plenty of credulousness to go round. Kanye West was suspended for posting a swastika image, about as clearly protected speech as it is possible to get, given the case law that actually exists. Musk also warned his followers that “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” - ie, that shadowbans would continue. (At least he admits it, I suppose.)

This little stunt would then be a way to get back on the front foot - to appear to be a free speech fundamentalist while, in fact, giving in to pressure from advertisers (always the strongest economic limit on acceptable speech in the media). He cannot give freedom to the right, at least not to an extent that will scare the horses. But he can give them the next best thing, indeed perhaps, in our nihilistic age, the thing they want more: revenge, the humiliation of their enemies and police actions against those enemies. Not for nothing did Musk amplify accusations against Roth that he is pro-paedophile: it is an omni-present obsession of the right, and manipulating it is as lazy as it is guaranteed to produce the desired effect.²

There is thus some justice to the attacks on the various journalists involved. They really have put themselves at the service of this dishonest agenda. Taibbi may be telling the truth when he claims that there were no conditions on the content of the leaks, only that they should first appear on Twitter:

Everyone involved with the project … has editorial control. We’ve been encouraged to look not just at historical Twitter, but the current iteration as well. I was told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk. If anything, the degree of openness on that front freaked me out a little initially, being so far from any other experience I’ve had.³

But Taibbi knows as well as we do that Musk has a history of capriciousness. Their access to this stuff is via Twitter company laptops, apparently, so can be restricted on a whim. This may or may not be in the writers’ minds; in any case, Musk cannot be unhappy with any of the releases so far.

Left myth

Regardless, this really ought to be the last nail in the coffin for a particularly pernicious left myth: the conjecture that mass social media heralded a new era of decentralised, unhierarchical politics. The principled critique of that aim is evergreen - the result is merely non-transparent hierarchy and lack of political legitimacy. Supposing it was desirable, however, anarchistic types who made this argument flatly misunderstood the nature of the internet, why it exists and on whose sufferance. Of course, culture has been transformed by pervasive internet access - in good ways and bad - and those changes have had an impact on left-wing culture. The fundamental problem posed to the left by the mass media, however, is not so much access (which radicals have enjoyed on the technological level since the Gutenberg press) but control - a problem which is political.

The consequence of ignoring the political problem was that a large chunk of the left has been happy to funnel its activity through channels designed for a fractious coalition of oligarchs and state agents. The results of this turn - from Occupy Wall Street to Podemos, from identitarian cliquery to UK Uncut (remember them?) - speak for themselves.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk