--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noelle King: As 2022 staggers toward a close, Elon Musk, of all people, has given us a glimpse into an issue that has the potential to consume Washington in 2023. We have a duty to do the work, to get the truth out there, to get the facts out there.
--:-- Noelle King: Earlier this month, Musk started leaking the Slack messages and emails of Twitter employees and former employees to a handful of journalists. The journalists labeled them the Twitter files and suggested that the leaked messages proved Twitter pre-Musk had unfairly banned Republican voices from the platform, blocked mentions of Hunter Biden's alleged misdeeds and threw former President Donald Trump off of Twitter without cause.
--:-- Noelle King: Republicans are now calling for investigations. We need to haul these people before Congress to testify under oath. And anyone who committed a crime should be prosecuted. And in 2023, Republicans will control the House, so not an empty threat.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up on Today Explained, what's in the Twitter files?
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--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I'm Shireen Ghaffari, a senior Vox correspondent who covers social media.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So Twitter files are a bunch of internal communications from Twitter about big decision points for the company, such as the decision to suspend former president Donald Trump.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And it's things like emails, private Slack messages, screenshots of Twitter's internal content moderation systems, a whole trove of those kinds of documents.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Elon Musk is the owner of Twitter. I get that. But how did he get people's internal communications, especially those that predated him buying Twitter?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Elon Musk, you know, as a new owner of Twitter, which he has now taken as a private company, is basically all in his control.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: When he bought the company, he got the keys to all of, you know, his employees' DMs, their direct messages, emails, any kind of correspondence.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: There's not a whole lot safeguarding a new owner from getting access to that when they buy a company.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I feel like this is a warning for maybe 60 to 70 percent of the people currently listening to this episode, myself included, maybe.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Who did Elon Musk give these emails and Slack communications and other files to?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So the two highest profile journalists who Elon Musk picked are Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Both are former correspondents or columnists from major media institutions.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Matt Taibbi worked for Rolling Stone. He made a name for himself as someone covering, you know, the mortgage crisis sort of before other people.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He branded Goldman Sachs a vampire squid in a famous article.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But now he's sort of disavowed mainstream media press and he writes his own independent sub stack newsletter.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And he, like Musk, has been a vocal critic of, you know, woke culture.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Now, if you go into a newsroom in North America, it's dead silent. Nobody says a thing.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Everybody's afraid of one another. If you say the wrong thing, if you tweet the wrong thing, you could end up having your newsroom make a movement against you and try to get you removed from the company.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Barry Weiss, similar story.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: She's a former New York Times opinion columnist who quit to start her own sub-stack, an independent publication now.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And she's also been someone who's been very critical about kind of a hive mind mainstream media culture that doesn't allow enough contrarian points of view.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: What's going on is the transformation of these sense-making institutions of American life.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: It's the news media. It's the publishing house. It's the Hollywood studios. It's our universities.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And they are narrowing in a radical way what's acceptable to say and what isn't.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Those are the people who Elon handpicked to sift through these messages.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: It is not something that he's giving access to a wide range of journalists or he's not doing a WikiLeaks-style dump of this online.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He's being very deliberate here about who he picks.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: All right, so Elon Musk gives the communications to Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi, and then they tweet about what they've gotten.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: In their threads, they point to how certain decisions were made within Twitter.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Let's go into what decisions we're talking about.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Yeah, so the most high-profile decision is around the suspension of Donald Trump, which was a landmark case.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: If this is not a clear reason to suspend him, again, as an unhinged ruler attempting to subvert the most powerful democracy in the world, I'm not sure what would be.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: What we saw leaked out was just all the buildup among Twitter staff about how they're going to handle Donald Trump, who, you know, was increasingly making statements that seemed to kind of potentially cause problems for the elections.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Right. First, he was sort of insinuating stuff about there could be fraud in this election.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And there was a lot of talk about mail-in voter fraud.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And so Twitter didn't suspend him at that time or other politicians saying that.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But they just sort of noted it internally.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: In some cases, they put up warning labels.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Then we see them deliberating once, you know, violence actually starts and Donald Trump starts talking about, you know, the protesters.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And, you know, people are widely basically viewing him as inciting this riot that's happening.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And at that time, we see a lot of deliberation about, OK, should we just pull the plug?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Team, Scale is asking if we would consider Trump's tweet for Gov.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: If we consider American patriots to refer to the rioters, they have a point.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Scale has said they understand our position, but will continue to push their Gov assessment with leadership.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: They see it that he is the leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: At some point in the buildup to this, they actually revise their policy around suspending high-profile accounts.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So what we see is just sort of you know a lot of people trying to figure out how to deal with what they knew was going to be a thorny political situation
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But I think what no one knew was going to escalate that quickly into actual violence which is ultimately why Twitter ended up making the call in favor of suspending the account
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But it was not without dissent, and there was a lot of talk internally that we see about that.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Then we also have a series of decisions, internal decision-making, around the release of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was a big story in the buildup to the 2022 elections.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: The New York Post published an article yesterday based on files and emails from a laptop the Post says belonged to Hunter Biden.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: The report alleges the former vice president used his position to advance his son's business interest in Ukraine and that both Bidens were not truthful about that relationship.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So what we saw was the debate at the time by Twitter employees who work on things like content policy and content moderation.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And they're saying, what should we do with this story?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: It's unclear if this story is even true.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Could be like a piece of viral misinformation that impacts the elections.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Does this violate our policy or not?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: We see a lot of internal debate like that.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we're waiting to understand if the story is the result of hacked materials.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: We'll face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: The policy basis is hacked materials, though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Given the severe risk here and the lessons of 2016, we're erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: We simply need more information.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: It seems like based on some of the screenshots that it was sort of unclear if this story really did violate Twitter's rules or not.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And they had to essentially make a judgment.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And, you know, I think this kind of thing as Taibbi and, you know, et al. are framing it, they see it as this is evidence that because essentially the claim they're making is that because these staff who are making these decisions about what to do with the story, because they may be liberal in their political beliefs or because many tech employees are liberal, that they think these people were making a biased decision.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But what the files actually show us is just sort of a lot of internal debate, right?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: A lot of should we or shouldn't we?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And ultimately, they end up blocking the story.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Big tech conspired with big media and the Democratic Party to suppress any investigation of the very legitimate national security concerns posed by the Biden family business.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: In one of the second installments, I believe, of the Twitter files, we saw Barry Weiss put out a thread showing how several prominent right-wing accounts and some contrarians or Twitter accounts had their profiles kind of quietly or privately downranked, meaning like less people saw these accounts posts in their feed without being totally banned.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And that's something that conservatives have long worried about and some people call shadow banning, which means when social media companies deliberately and secretly hide someone's posts from the rest of the public.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Part two of the Twitter files confirming what conservatives knew all along.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: They were being censored.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Twitter has argued in the past that like they don't shadow ban that, but that they do demote sort of your tweets if what you're saying breaks some of their rules.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But their argument would be, I mean, I'm speaking to past Twitter management, would be that in these cases that you could still see this person's tweets if you look them up so that it wasn't complete shadow banning.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I think, honestly, that's a matter of semantics and you could debate your definition of what it means to be shadow banned.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But what the Twitter file showed is that some of these known to be controversial accounts like right wing commentator Dan Bongino, the libs of TikTok account, that they had their tweets essentially lowered in Twitter's algorithms.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Right.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And what their tweets weren't being surfaced as highly as other people's at certain points.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: All you media clowns and goons and nuts who told me I was the crazy conspiracy theorist.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Tell me we live in a free country when an opinion guy like me cannot speak on these platforms or is restricted from doing so.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: What we were missing in the Twitter files and I really wanted to see was more context around why.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Because there are valid reasons why Twitter may want to downrank someone's tweets.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Elon himself has said that he will use this tactic for people who spread spam or say things that are not pleasant.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So, you know, it was interesting to get a peek at these accounts, but without knowing fully all the accounts who were ever downranked, why they were downranked, we don't know if this is really full on shadow banning or it's just sort of everyday business that Twitter was doing in order to make its platform usable and pleasant for other people.
--:-- Noelle King: All right, let's talk about the reception that the Twitter files got, right?
--:-- Noelle King: So they emerge out into the world in the form of tweet threads from a select few journalists.
--:-- Noelle King: And then I saw a lot of outrage.
--:-- Noelle King: What did you see? Are people thrilled that this information has been released to the public or are they furious?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I think what we see ends up being a kind of Rorschach test for your political beliefs.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I think virtually no Democratic politician has spoken out against the Twitter files or been enraged.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But we see a lot of fury from the right because they see this as evidence that liberal left-wing tech companies are out to get them.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Even though it's more nuanced than that, even though there isn't clear proof that Joe Biden was forcing Twitter to take down Trump, this is enough.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: There's like enough smoke there that we see conservatives sort of claiming there's fire.
--:-- Noelle King: Do you think we've seen evidence over the past couple of days that Elon Musk is actually politically veering to the right?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Absolutely.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: I mean, we've seen him say my preferred gender pronouns are prosecute slash Fauci.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So, you know, he has made what many people are viewing as sort of dog whistles to QAnon, tweeting an image of a white rabbit, which is a popular QAnon slogan.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Unclear if he was aware of that, but it's not his first time.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He's also tweeted an image of a Pepe the Frog meme, which is a common meme of the far right.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He has himself, he's told people that he thinks they should vote Republican.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He later said that's just because he wants people to balance power between Democrats and Republicans.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But ultimately, we have seen in recent months and years, really, Elon Musk shift to the right.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: And I think we're seeing that on hyperspeed right now as he's jumping into all this controversy with Twitter.
--:-- Noelle King: Do you think that Elon Musk really believes there was something egregiously bad going on at Twitter?
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Look, I'm not Elon Musk's head, but I don't think he thinks this is a nothing burger because he has consistently touched on these same themes that are in the Twitter files.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Elon has always said that he thinks that you know big tech is censoring too many viewpoints and that they should allow more freedom of speech that they lean.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He criticized big tech for being too liberal.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He thinks they need to come to the middle more.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So this is sort of in line with his stated ideology.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: These findings are in line with what Elon Musk has accused Twitter of all along.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: So I don't think he thinks this is a nothing burger.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But I do think that this does serve as a convenient distraction from all the drama that Twitter is in right now.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: The company could be going bankrupt by Elon Musk's own admission in the imminent future.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: Advertisers are pulling out left and right.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: He's scrambling to figure out a subscription model that works to get people to pay for Twitter.
--:-- Shireen Ghaffari: But so far, that's gone off to a rocky start.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, how Republicans plan to use the Twitter files.
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--:-- Noelle King: There's a much larger story here than just a Twitter file.
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I'm Andrew Prokop, a senior politics correspondent at Vox.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: even as Elon Musk is leaking Slack messages and emails to a handful of reporters, it seems he's banning others.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Reporters for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among others, found their accounts suspended or banned last night.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, one installment of the files focused on Twitter's decision to temporarily block from the site a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's emails.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, Twitter's decision was in part driven by a letter from intelligence officials who said they thought the story might be disinformation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Don't put it up on Twitter, they tell Twitter.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Twitter says, OK, it all makes sense.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But now probable potential House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he plans to subpoena those intelligence officials.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Why does that matter?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When the Hunter Biden laptop story was first published, there was a lot of speculation that this was a Russian hack similar to the leaks of John Podesta's hacked emails and the DNC's hacked emails in 2016.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That never had any actual evidence behind it, but the theory spread, especially among liberals, because the story of how this Hunter Biden material got out, which was basically that he abandoned his laptop at a computer repair store where the repairman was legally blind and wasn't even sure it was Hunter dropping it off seemed kind of wacky.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So these former intelligence officials signed the letter saying, hey, this has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But now two years later, no evidence has emerged to debunk the initial story of how the laptop was dropped off at the repair store or to prove that this was hacked.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it looks like they were wrong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, the theory among some conservatives is that maybe they weren't just wrong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Maybe they were lying.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Maybe this was a deliberate ploy to try to save Biden in the election by getting these supposedly damning emails and documents discrediting them so the media wouldn't talk about them.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And, you know, I don't think there's any evidence to support that either, though.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think it's probably more likely that the officials were just kind of given their own opinion and that they happened to be wrong about this, that it wasn't a conspiracy.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I would note that the Twitter file releases generally have not backed up the most conspiratorial theories from the right about how Twitter was making its decisions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You can argue that they show that Twitter executives were in a bit of a liberal bubble, but no evidence has emerged that, you know, before the election, they were saying, oh, we got to help Biden win.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We got to stop Trump and sabotage Trump and stop him from winning.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Kevin McCarthy now making this threat, it matters in a different way because of the outcome of the midterms.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, Republicans control the House now, which means they have a majority on House committees, which gives them subpoena power.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They did not have that in the previous two years of the Biden administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they will have the ability to subpoena companies, the intelligence officials themselves, former executives, and try to pursue testimony and to try to obtain documents as well.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The most famous Republican investigation for the House in recent times was the Benghazi investigation in Obama second term.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Is the U involved with any procuring of weapons transfer of weapons buying selling anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya To Turkey?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I will have to take that question for the record.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Nobody's ever raised that with me.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that was frequently dismissed as, oh, it didn't really find anything of note.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But What it did have was some unintended consequences because in looking around at various emails they obtained through subpoena, they realized that Hillary Clinton did not have an official State Department email address, which made its way to the FBI, which then began investigating her for the email scandal.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And some argue that that is why Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, because of the Hillary Clinton email scandal driving her numbers down by just enough.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If Jim Jordan and Republicans investigate and if they uncover something, where could this be headed?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're certainly going to see hearings where they probably yell at some people, try to make them look bad.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But I think the more interesting thing is they're not going to achieve anything by making intelligence officials or Twitter executives look bad.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What they're going to really want to find is wrongdoing or misconduct by Joe Biden, the Biden administration or the Biden presidential campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio tweeted, essentially, we were right.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Republicans were right about the shadow bans.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So this is a long-running allegation that Republicans' tweets would sometimes get flagged and banned on Twitter because they were Republicans' tweets.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What is the significance of a guy like Jim Jordan saying, we were right all along?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, Jordan is the House Judiciary Committee chair-in-waiting, so he is going to have the power to pursue this stuff further.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We have a duty to do the work, to get the truth out there, to get the facts out there.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's step one in stopping this kind of baloney from happening in the future.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We can't have a Justice Department that's political.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We can't have a Justice Department that's working hand in hand with the biggest social media platforms.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, I don't think that the Twitter files have actually shown that he is right, that these accounts were flagged or banned because they were Republicans.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The Twitter files reports showed that some accounts were indeed de-boosted or were blocked from trending or were even banned entirely.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it did not really get into, except for the case of Donald Trump, discussions into why those accounts were de-boosted, blocked, or banned.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So in any case, Jordan is going to get the chance to hunt around for more evidence for his theory with his subpoena power.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A third high-profile Republican who's commented is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So he released a statement criticizing Twitter for cracking down on Republicans, especially on Donald Trump, but not on Democrats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Hawley is one of those guys who's got a very loud voice, but it's never quite clear what his effect is.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Where, if anywhere, do you see Hawley fitting in here?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Hawley is somewhat interesting because he has been a loud skeptic of big tech in the Republican Party and just a voice in the discussions calling on perhaps more to be done to limit the influence of big tech, break up companies and so on.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What we have is an unprecedented concentration of power by these corporate monopolies working in league with the left.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I call them the woke capitalists.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, they're only interested in capitalism insofar as they can control it and use it to impose their viewpoints.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he will be sitting in a Senate with a Democratic majority, so he wouldn't actually have the ability to craft any legislation unless, of course, he could win over Democratic support for it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I want to talk about where you think this might be headed.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So on December 11th, Elon Musk tweeted out something that offended a lot of people.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He tweeted, my pronouns are prosecute slash Fauci.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A Twitter user responds to him and says, will this be explained in a new Twitter files part?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Elon responds, yes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What do you glean from this? Where is this going?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: These Twitter files have not really said very much about the Biden administration doing anything improper at all.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's all about the former executives at Twitter.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What is interesting about this is that this involves the Biden administration as well.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There was a time period in 2021 where the Biden administration, both publicly and privately, became really aggressive towards social media companies in trying to get them to ban misinformation spreaders about vaccines specifically and COVID generally.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They called for specific accounts to be banned, pointing to a report that an activist group had issued about a dozen accounts that were supposedly spreading most of this misinformation on Facebook.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so this is a very clear case of the federal government using its power to ask social media companies to ban or block speech of people who have not violated any law.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so there's already a lawsuit about this in federal court brought by the Attorney General of Missouri against the Biden administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They've been trying to obtain documents to get a better understanding of what happened behind the scenes, what the administration was telling these social media companies and how exactly they were asking to get these accounts taken down.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This might be the issue of Biden administration misconduct that Republicans were looking for.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Victoria Chamberlain.
--:-- Noelle King: It was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Noelle King: It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noelle King: Thank you.
--:-- Noelle King: No matter your vibe, you can explore the Macy's Fall Fashion Guide and find the perfect look for you.
--:-- Noelle King: Shop in-store or online at nacy's.com.
