The Twitter Files reveal the left will win at any cost
Elon Musk made good on his promise to increase transparency by releasing Twitter’s internal communications surrounding the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 election. The documentation, laid out in a detailed thread by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday evening, revealed what almost anyone who had been paying attention suspected: that the social media giant colluded to suppress a legitimate news story to impact the 2020 election. The thread explained that tools that were initially added to Twitter to combat issues like spam and financial fraud eventually became avenues for censorship. According to Taibbi, both political parties could, in theory, lobby for the censorship of posts they objected to, but in practice the censorship had a consistent bias. Because the censorship system was based on connections and personal favors, the Twitter team’s extremely progressive political orientation led them to honor the requests of the left far more often than the requests of the right. The internal documents show Twitter staff regularly removing posts at the request of both the Biden team and the Democratic National Committee.
While conservatives, who are used to media bias, should not be shocked at the level of collusion on display, having the smoking gun is always valuable. The Twitter Files reveal a bureaucratic preference cascade in which a network of smaller decisions and biases led to one of the biggest scandals in recent memory. Taibbi’s reporting shows how the effort to suppress the New York Post’s report utilized extraordinary measures previously only used to block extremely malicious material like child pornography. White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account after tweeting about the story, and links to the story were blocked even in private direct messages. The story was, in theory, blocked under the company’s policy on hacked material, but the internal documents reveal that many employees knew this reasoning was dubious. Questions about legality and violations of the First Amendment were raised but seemed to be immediately trampled by the internal momentum of the decision. The prospect of Donald Trump winning reelection was too much for the progressive bureaucracy inside Twitter to bear, and so at every opportunity they doubled down on the decision to censor the report.
One would think that clear evidence of a conspiracy by a major corporation to suppress journalism in the attempt to influence a democratic election would enrage your average reporter, but of course the response was exactly the opposite. Establishment hacks quickly went to work attempting to assassinate Taibbi’s character, accusing him of doing “PR for the richest man in the world." Far from being shocked by the politically motivated attack on freedom of the press, liberal journalists rushed to voice their support for the censorship and declare the story a “nothingburger." There is no smoking gun, nothing to see here, just the internal communications of a company doing its job to stop the election of Donald Trump.
These moments are always difficult for conservatives, because with these major revelations of corruption, they always expect a price to be paid. The rules have been broken, the sacred trust of journalists revealing the truth has been infringed, the legitimacy of elections has been impacted; surely justice will follow. But that moment will not come, because the very class of people whom Americans rely on to hold the powerful accountable do not just agree with this decision, they fully endorse it. The left will drone on and on about the importance of democracy, write endless articles about the sacred duty of the press, but they only see these institutions as tools for the retention of power. Democracy is only valuable when it assures the advance of a left-wing agenda. Journalism is only valuable when it is destroying the enemies of the progressive movement. Any journalist revealing the corruption inside Twitter that led to the censorship of the Hunter Biden story is a traitor to the party who deserves to be discredited and discarded.
Auron nails it every time. “Conservatives” are stuck in the 1980s, soon to join the ash heap of history.
Contrary to the hype, Musk has not unbanned most of the credible threats to progressive-held institutions. He did reinstate some conservative/independent pundits and politicians, so I guess we’re supposed to be grateful?