To understand what is important about the Twitter Files, it helps to be clear about what they are not
about material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop because the story was based on hacked material, only to see that justification unravel. They stick to their guns for a few more days, then do a-turn, but the damage to their credibility is done. It is hard to argue that a set of employees who were more right-wing would have made the same decisions.
The section of the Files on the banning of Mr Trump’s account, while titillating, tells a story that is almost identical to the account that Twitter published itself on January 8th 2021, shortly after the decision was taken. Mr Trump was banned for violating Twitter’s policy against Glorification of Violence because of links between his social-media emissions and the actions of the January 6th rioters.
Both cases create strong emotional responses; the presentation of the Files is designed to elicit it. But they do not tell the world anything about biases that may have existed across Twitter as a whole. Indeed, a much more representative dataset,in November 2021, showed that the algorithm which chooses what tweet-users see in their feeds tended to give tweets from-Republicans a significant boost over those from Democrats. There was no conspiracy.
There are straightforward ways for Mr Musk to provide good evidence of bias against Republicans . But when Alex Stamos, a well-regarded internet researcher, asked Mr Musk to allow access to data necessary to verify the claim that Twitter’s rules “were enforced against the right, but not against the left“, Mr Musk dismissed Mr Stamos as a propagandist. That was an odd response for a man engaging in a radical transparency campaign.
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