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The Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads based on internal Twitter, Inc. documents shared by owner Elon Musk with freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in December 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the release of the documents with Twitter management.

The first installment, written by Taibbi on December 2, 2022, detailed the deliberation process Twitter took regarding content moderation related to a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy in October 2020 as well as some other content. Musk and Republicans alleged the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress information. Taibbi tweeted that federal law enforcement gave Twitter a "general" warning about foreign hacks but that the Twitter files showed "no evidence ... of any government involvement in the laptop story", thus failing to support a conservative claim that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories. Taibbi also did not say any Democrats had asked Twitter to suppress the story.

The second thread, presented by Weiss on December 8, addressed what Musk has called "shadow banning" of some users, a practice referred to as "visibility filtering" by previous Twitter management. Twitter had announced in 2018 a new policy of limiting the reach of accounts exhibiting patterns of "troll-like behaviors," which resembled Musk's newly announced "freedom of speech, but not of reach" policy of "negative/hate tweets" being "deboosted".

Background

This section needs expansion with: more background about content moderation at Twitter; current focus of the Background section is exclusively the NYPost article & Hunter Biden laptop controversy. You can help by adding to itadding to it or making an edit request. (December 2022)

On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published articles using emails from a laptop which the Post alleged to show corruption by then-US presidential candidate Joe Biden with regard to his son Hunter Biden's tenure as a director at Burisma Holdings Limited. Then-President Donald Trump made several false claims about Joe Biden's involvement. In March 2022, in-depth investigations by the Washington Post and New York Times authenticated some relevant emails, but did not find that Joe Biden had committed any improprieties.

Later on October 14, Twitter decided to restrict the sharing of the Post's story under its "hacked materials" policy, and locked accounts that shared it, including those of the newspaper and then White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany. The moves drew criticism over potentially inconsistent enforcement and lack of transparency. According to then-CEO Jack Dorsey, Twitter actions were a mistake. As the Post's story did not violate its hacked materials policy.

On October 19, 2020, stating that the release of the alleged emails "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation", though they refrained from saying the emails were not genuine. There had been alleged extensive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election via social media. In August 2022, Mark Zuckerberg stated that a prior FBI warning about an impending Russian disinformation "dump" prompted Facebook to suppress the New York Post story. Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth had testified that Twitter received similar warnings. In response, conservatives alleged that the FBI had pressured Twitter to suppress the story; however, Taibbi said he did not see evidence of this while reviewing the files.

Publication

On November 28, 2022, Musk promised that "The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself." The internal Twitter documents were given by Musk to freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Taibbi noted that "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions" that he did not disclose. Weiss later wrote that the only condition they agreed to was that the material would be first published on Twitter.

On December 6, James A. Baker, deputy general counsel at Twitter, was fired by Elon Musk for allegedly vetting information before it was passed on to Taibbi and Weiss, and providing an explanation that Musk found "unconvincing". Baker had been involved in the decision to withhold the laptop story, and had previously been general counsel for the FBI when he was a witness for, but not implicated in, the failed John Durham prosecution of Michael Sussmann on allegations he worked with the 2016 Clinton campaign to advance a Russian collusion narrative against Trump.

Content

According to Taibbi, the Twitter Files number in the thousands. According to CNBC's December 7 publication, Musk said that the future "Twitter Files" releases would include how Twitter handled the 2020 presidential election, the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part one (by Matt Taibbi)

On December 2, Taibbi published a Twitter thread revealing internal Twitter emails, interspersed with his own reporting. Elon Musk retweeted Taibbi's thread. Some of these documents described Twitter's internal deliberations regarding the decision to censor the reporting of the New York Post regarding the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, while others contained information on how Twitter treated tweets that were flagged for removal at the request of the 2020 Biden campaign team and the Trump White House.

Taibbi's thread revealed an internal debate on whether Twitter should prevent the New York Post story from being shared. Twitter leadership decided to suppress the story, arguing that it fell under the company's prohibition on hacked materials. According to Taibbi, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was unaware of the decision when it was made; days later, he reversed the story's suppression, calling it a "mistake", and Twitter updated its hacked materials policy to state that news stories about hacked materials would be permitted, but with a contextual warning.

Taibbi reported Twitter had "received and honored" deletion requests from both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House; he presented examples of the former but not of the latter. Taibbi also said Twitter had blocked tweets by former Trump administration officials promoting the New York Post story, but did not say that Democrats had requested action on the story. He said Democrats had more contacts with Twitter than did Republicans, but provided no internal documents to establish that. Taibbi also shared communications between Rep. Ro Khanna and then-Twitter head of legal Vijaya Gadde, in which Khanna criticized Twitter's decision to censor the Post story.

The Biden campaign asked Twitter to review five tweets, which were later deleted. Taibbi did not disclose the content of the Biden campaign requests, presenting only their URLs; the content of four deleted tweets were later found by others from internet archives. Those four tweets contained nude photos and videos of Hunter Biden, which violate Twitter policy and California law as revenge porn. The content of the fifth deleted tweet is unknown.

Musk tweeted during the Taibbi presentation that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government" in violation of the First Amendment. However, Taibbi initially reported no government involvement in the laptop story. While the First Amendment does not restrict private companies from performing content moderation, after the release of Part 3, Taibbi reported that " the Slack entries in Part 3 contain multiple, clear displays of cooperation between Twitter and federal law enforcement and/or intelligence ", allegedly involving Twitter and FBI/DHS/DNI coordination in the events described in the leaked Twitter Files. Taibbi's reporting undermined a key narrative promoted by Musk and Republicans that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories. Taibbi tweeted, "Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story." Trump was president at the time in question and had appointed the sitting FBI director.

According to CNN, Taibbi's Twitter thread confirmed what was already known and did not contain any significant new revelations.

Part two (by Bari Weiss)

On December 4, Musk stated that a second "Twitter Files" release would again involve Taibbi, along with former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.

On December 8, Weiss released the second installment of the "Twitter Files”, addressing what Musk has called "shadow banning" of some users, a practice referred to as "visibility filtering" by previous Twitter management. Weiss characterized the Twitter process as "all in secret, without informing users," though the company announced in 2018 that it would begin limiting accounts exhibiting patterns of "troll-like behaviors." The practice resembled Musk's newly announced "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach" policy.

Weiss shared several images of the internal Twitter system, shared with her by Twitter Trust and Safety manager Ella Irwin, with various accounts marked as blacklisted in different ways: "Trends Blacklist," “Search Blacklist”, “Do Not Amplify”. The blacklisted accounts include Jay Bhattacharya, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Libs of TikTok, and others. Musk and Weiss have called this downranking system "shadow banning," using a less restrictive definition (limits on sharing) than Twitter had previously used for the term (complete blocking of sharing). Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's former head of product, responded on Twitter that Weiss was "characterizing any de-amplification as equating to shadow banning which is either a lazy interpretation or deliberately misleading." However, several scholars define shadow-banning as the practice of limiting tweets' distribution.

After Weiss's publication, Musk stated that an upcoming update to the Twitter platform will show to the user whether the user has been "shadowbanned," the reason why, and how to appeal.

Writing for Forbes, Robert Hart wrote that the old system of downranking at Twitter, which he said Weiss had characterized as secretive and nefarious acts of censorship, was similar to Musk's current policy which Musk referred to as "freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach."

Part three (by Matt Taibbi)

In a third installment of the Twitter Files, on December 9, Matt Taibbi authored a thread with 67 tweets about Twitter's moderation of President Donald Trump, from October 2020 to January 6, 2021 which led to the decision by Twitter management to permanently suspend Trump's personal Twitter account, according to both Rolling Store and Fox News. Although "much of this information had already been public knowledge", according to Rolling Stone.

A Twitter staff asked, referring to Trump, "Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?" Followed by executives at Twitter discussing their plan to "prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even President Joe Biden. To which an executive replied that Biden "will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary."

Taibbi argued that there had been an "erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies".

A later message from Roth reads, "Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets". In turn, Roth used the Facebook financed Politifact, to justify, as Twitter executive, his final go-ahead with this censorship process. Which, according to him, was initiated by the FBI government agency.

Taibbi also noted an October 2020 Trump tweet in which he had claimed without evidence there were "big problems" with mail-in ballots across the country. Twitter attached an advisory on the tweet and prevented it from being retweeted, liked or replied to. Taibbi said the tweet was "visibility filtered" by Twitter staff. During the presidential campaign, Trump had repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in balloting would cause widespread fraud.

Planned releases on other topics

According to Taibbi, on December 10, Michael Shellenberger will cover events inside Twitter on January 7, 2020, and on December 11, Bari Weiss will cover internal communications from January 8 onward.

Reactions

Politicians

After the first Taibbi thread, former Trump White House official and conservative radio host Seb Gorka said, "so far, I’m deeply underwhelmed." He rejected statements made by posters on Truth Social that the First Amendment had been violated. In a Fox News interview, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy defended Taibbi's reporting and said of Elon Musk that his critics are "trying to discredit a person for telling the truth".

According to Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, "We thought Twitter was a corrupt cesspool. We never knew it was this bad."

Democratic House Representative Ro Khanna confirmed the authenticity of his email to Twitter where he criticized the suppression of the New York Post's story as a violation of First Amendment principles. He also said that Twitter should implement "clear and public criteria" of removal or non-promotion of content, make such decisions in a transparent way, and give users a way to appeal the decisions.

Legal scholars

According to David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, Twitter is free to decide what content to allow on its platform, and both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House were free to make content suggestions.

Former Twitter employees

Twitter's former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey urged Musk to release all the internal documents "without filter" at once, including all of Twitter's discussions around current and future actions on content moderation.

Taibbi was criticized for his failure to redact email addresses from the published screenshots; Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, called it "fundamentally unacceptable"; Musk conceded that the email addresses should have been redacted.

Journalists

Many technology journalists wrote that the reported evidence did not demonstrate much more than Twitter's policy team having a difficult time making a tough call, but resolving the matter swiftly, while conservative commentators said that Taibbi's reporting demonstrated the existence of liberal bias at Twitter prior to the company's acquisition by Musk.

According to a Forbes article, Taibbi's posts contained "no bombshells", and showed "no government involvement in the laptop story," contradicting a conspiracy theory that claimed the FBI was involved. Taibbi received criticism from MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan for the appearance of performing public relations for Musk; Taibbi responded by asking how many of his critics "have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House".

Miranda Devine, a conservative columnist with the New York Post who was among the first to write about the laptop, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the presentation wasn't the "smoking gun we’d hoped for," adding, "I feel that Elon Musk has held back some material," alluding to a meeting he had with Apple CEO Tim Cook days earlier, amid speculation Apple might remove the Twitter app from its App Store. Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote that "the files paint an ugly portrait of a social-media company’s management unilaterally deciding that its role was to keep breaking news away from the public instead of letting people see the reporting and drawing their own conclusions."

The Editorial Board at The Wall Street Journal praised the release for exposing "a form of political corruption" where current and former U.S. intelligence officials have influence on elections.

A critical article by Rolling Stone said that Taibbi, in Part 3, "failed acknowledge that much of this information had already been public knowledge, and therefore studied" and called the rollout "sloppy, selective, and out of context".

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• Elon Musk
• Twitter controversies
• December 2022 events in the United States
• Hunter Biden