It is fair to say that hopes on the right for the secrets Elon Musk might reveal, having taken over twitter, were probably too high. Certainly, there were some people who seemed to believe that there would be a smoking gun – an internal message from some senior figure instructing all sub-ordinates to seek out and silence anybody with views to the political right of, say, Tony Blair, and proof of the systemic silencing of anybody and everybody who expressed mild disagreement with the media consensus.
Such a smoking gun has not emerged – nor was it ever likely to have done so. In part because the problem at companies like twitter is not so much liberal conspiracy as liberal culture: Utter conviction that there is only one definition of “hate”, only one definition of “fake news and misinformation”, and so on.
What has emerged, though, is still very important, and should be far bigger news in mainstream media than it is.
First, shadowbans were real:
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
It is abundantly clear, and indisputable, from what emerged over the weekend that Twitter was, in recent years, actively suppressing twitter accounts with large followings that challenged or disputed the progressive narrative on a range of issues. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, for example, is no fringe anonymous account – he is a Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. His crime was to aggressively challenge the science around lockdowns and covid vaccination strategy. Twitter, without informing anybody, actively worked to make sure his voice was less prominent in the conversation on those issues than it otherwise would have been.
That, surely, is an enormous story? It does count, without any doubt, as a social media company actively putting its thumb on the scale of public discussion and debate to influence public policy outcomes.
Put it this way: If a big company – say Google, or Apple, or Shell Oil – was spending tens of millions of euros to run advertising trying to influence the public’s views on an issue, that would result in acres of media scrutiny, rightly. Yet here we have express evidence that Twitter was doing the exact same thing – seeking to influence the public’s views – at no cost to itself, and there’s nary a whisper in the media. Why?
The obvious answers are obvious: First, there is fear and loathing in the media towards Elon Musk, for his perceived conservatism. Musk has been definitively placed, alongside former President Trump, Boris Johnson, and various others, in the “disgraceful ne’er-do-well” box, of whose members no good shall be spoken or written, lest readers or (worse) fellow journalists come to the conclusion that a reporter is not entirely “sound” on the issues.
Second: Journalists themselves were not especially affected.
This is one of the works of genius that underpinned twitter’s campaign of suppression and censorship: When you build a protected class of persons, replete with blue ticks and amplification of their views, so long as they stay “onside”, you will have their loyalty forever. That’s another reason there’s so much hostility to Musk – the idea that he might “dismantle” the present power structure on twitter is attractive to those who lose out from that power structure as currently defined, but it is a direct threat to those who benefit from it.
The mind has fascinating ways of rationalizing self-interest, as well: Many journalists will automatically conclude, as a matter of faith, that a person shadowbanned on twitter was likely up to no good anyway. It’s amazing how many people will go from “this wasn’t happening” to “if it was happening, it was probably for good reason”, and move on.
The other problem here, put simply, is something called “mission creep”. If you don’t want to know what “mission creep” is, the classic example is the Americans invading Afghanistan to catch Osama Bin Laden, and ending up staying there for 20 years to try (and fail) to build a democratic state.
In this case, the “mission creep” relates to “fake news”.
The goal of ensuring that public debate is underpinned by agreed and verifiable facts is not a bad one, on paper. The difficulty with it, of course, is that we no longer live in an era where there are, or are likely to be, many “agreed facts”. It is a fact in Ireland for example that the Standards in Public Office commission exonerated Leo Varadkar recently. Does this mean, for example, that he was innocent of all guilt in the “leak” scandal? And if a person tweets that he was guilty, regardless of what SIPO found, is that “fake news”?
In search of “verifiable facts”, companies like twitter have turned to “experts” – this meant for example that during covid, only the views of official experts on matters like masks, lockdowns, and vaccines could be tweeted. The problem with that is that it treated evolving scientific opinion as “fact” – for example, facemasks were unnecessary one week, and mandatory the next. Once scientific opinion changed, so did what one was allowed to say.
Probably, for any of this to get any awareness, Musk is going to have to start banning or restricting Liberal journalists and liberal commentators. Subject them to the same rules of engagement that the rest of us suffered through. Perhaps then, they might sit up and take notice.
Because very serious revelations are emerging about the culture at twitter, and right now, the media is determinedly looking the other way.