The "Twitter Files" and the Meme Wars

Elon Musk's alliance with the far-right may just be him flailing at a way to make Twitter profitable, or the world's richest man acting in his class interest. Either way it's terrible for democracy.

If you are a “very online person” or even just a somewhat online person, you’ve probably heard something about “The Twitter Files” in the last ten days or so. I tried to stay away, I really did. But while there’s very little to the stories tweet-threads that have been published by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger based on their reading of internal company files handed to them by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, the controversy is unfortunately unavoidable. What follows is my best effort at putting it in context.

First, here’s what I think you need to know so far about the so-called “Twitter Files” themselves, which, to date, amount to five installments.

Installment one: Back in October 2020, Twitter executives decided to block the spread of a story about Hunter Biden’s purloined laptop that had appeared in the NY Post. There were lots of reasons to handle the laptop story with kid gloves—foreign powers had previously disrupted the 2016 election with hacked material, other news organizations including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News had passed on the opportunity to get an exclusive on the laptop story, and reporters at the NY Post had refused to put their bylines on what was published. Still, Twitter over-reacted (locking the account of a White House staffer who had shared the link, among other things) and corrected its mistake in a day, something its CEO Jack Dorsey later explained quite openly in congressional testimony. But Taibbi’s thread made no mention of these facts, and instead hyped the episode as proof that the company was biased toward the left in its political content moderation decisions, touting examples of company executives blocking tweets at the express request of the Biden campaign team. That some of what Twitter blocked was actually the non-consensual sharing of pictures pulled off the laptop of Hunter Biden’s penis was also not mentioned by Taibbi. I suppose we could call him an unreliable narrator.

Second in the unreliable narrator department comes Bari Weiss, the former New York Times columnist who these days runs a popular Substack devoted to attacking the left for various thought crimes. Her thread focused on some examples of Twitter actively limiting the visibility of specific user accounts or topics, claiming she had discovered proof of it secretly “shadow banning” users—a longtime claim of the right—when all she actually found was evidence of something Twitter has long been open about doing: using filtering tools and human moderation to try to reduce the spread of harmful disinformation. Among the users whose accounts were downranked: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine who has been a harsh critic of Covid lockdowns; rightwing talkshow host Dan Bongino, an election denier and Covid misinformer who said in 2018 that “my entire life right now is about owning the libs”; and conservative activist Charlie Kirk (who was ultimately banned for misgendering U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine).

That Weiss singled out for praise all of these accounts along with the notorious @LibsofTikTok account, a key vector of vicious attacks and violent threats on transgender people and their caregivers as well as on school boards for curricula or policies favoring inclusivity or racial awareness, made clear that this was a political beef from Weiss dressed in overheated claims about the First Amendment. As Tom Coates, an Internet media veteran, noted in response (his whole thread is worth a read), all big tech platforms make decisions about what content to show to people and what to downrank, employees often wrestle internally with how to interpret specific instances, and sometimes they make mistakes. “There is no non-political way to moderate. If you say we shouldn’t post porn there will be people who think that’s a political assault on sex workers. If you think trans people should be able post their pronouns, then there will be people who consider that an affront.” Again, like Taibbi, Weiss didn’t offer a balanced discussion of the issues. She has a new web project to promote, after all.

Third was a series (so far) of three threads, one from Taibbi, one from Michael Shellenberger (a disaffected environmentalist who has found a new career as a progressive-hater and failed California politician), and one from Weiss, all devoted to Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform in January 2021. Taibbi’s thread has gotten the most attention because it shows that top company execs like Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, were meeting with federal security officials during the fall of 2020 who were sharing tips about election-related disinformation. Taibbi claims that instead of using a “rules-based” process, these execs became like “a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.” Shellenberger zeroes in on what happened right after the January 6th insurrection, when a variety of mostly liberal-to-left voices inside and outside the company (Michelle Obama, Kara Swisher, the Anti-Defamation League and tech investor Chris Sacca are the names he highlights) pressed CEO Jack Dorsey to do something he had long resisted, which was to shut down Trump’s account. Again, not much new is revealed—these calls were all public at the time as were a mass petition from Twitter employees.

And finally with a thread that came out yesterday, Weiss focuses on January 8th, after the damage from the Capitol riot was clear to all, and Dorsey dropped the hammer on Trump. She focuses on two tweets by the President that, to her mind, couldn’t have been the last strike against him, and arguably she’s right that Trump tweeting about the “75,000,000 Great American Patriots” who voted for him or announcing that he wouldn’t be attending the January 20th inauguration were not sufficient grounds for Dorsey’s ultimate decision. Still, Weiss tells us, darkly, that “after January 6…pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.” As if fostering a violent coup against American democracy was not something to be concerned about. Weiss trots out a series of offensive tweets by other world leaders that didn’t lead to their banning, which she thinks proves Twitter was being unfair to Trump. To which all one can say is, surely you don’t think Twitter’s CEO was really operating according to narrow rules and prior precedent when he banned the company’s most famous user after an attempted coup?

What is actually going on here?

Let’s not be naïve. There’s an ongoing battle to control the narrative about democracy in America. From January 6th 2021 until now, the dominant narrative has been simple. Trump and his allies have been trying to undo the results of the 2020 election, using lies, fake electors, spurious legal arguments and finally open violence. The hearings of the January 6th select committee reinforced that narrative, mostly relying on testimony from honest Republicans. People who believe that 2020 was stolen from Trump have taken over most of the Republican Party, but wherever there was a competitive election this fall nearly all of those election deniers were defeated. That’s gotta hurt. Still, the House of Representatives is about to be taken over by Republican election deniers and the battle to shape the democracy narrative is far from over.

Enter Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who tried to get out his flip decision last spring to buy Twitter, but who now owns the platform and obviously wants to make it profitable. Whether it’s because he has become a full-blown rightwinger or because he thinks pandering to the right is the best way to make Twitter solvent, he’s decided that owning the libs is the strategy. (Kara Swisher, who has known Musk for a long time, thinks it’s the latter, but really it’s not clear what difference it makes.) And now he is the sole master of a giant platform, an Eye of Sauron that he can point wherever he wants. The people choosing to enable him now should go down in history alongside other monsters.

There’s no better book for putting this all into context than Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg’s new tour-de-farce guide to what they call “the online battles upending democracy in America.”

Here’s how they explain our times:

--“Meme wars are culture wars, accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trade outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flattens the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words, a morass capable of swallowing patience, kindness and understanding.”

--“The meme warriors of the past decade were not initially fighting for a common goal like Stop the Steal….Depending on their world-view, those summoned into the meme wars blamed varying enemies: the national banks, capitalism, immigrants coming to ‘take all our jobs,’ Communist liberals who wanted everyone to be gay and socialist, and so on. As the meme wars wore on, they became about replacement anxiety—white Americans’ anxiety that immigrants and people of other races would displace their position at the top of the social hierarchy, and men’s anxiety that women would displace them.”

--Meme warriors evangelize by using “red pills,” provocative ideas that challenge the status quo, which they scatter across the open internet, hoping to destabilize people’s thinking and pull them down rabbit holes of “alternative facts” that, through repetition, redundancy, social proof (look how many likes!), and algorithmic reinforcement, convince people that they’ve “done their own research” and discovered some hidden truth. (The fact that many American evangelicals already come predisposed to question secular media and trust textual analysis that reminds them of Bible study makes them especially vulnerable to red-pilling.)

--These people all position themselves against the liberal consensus, against multiracial liberal democracy and against government involvement in social life. Donovan and her co-authors use the term “the red-pilled right” as a catch-all for this anti-establishment collection of factions, which also includes “the alt-right, white nationalists, fascists, incels, men in the manosphere, trolls, red-pilled gamers, New World Order conspiracists, and militias.”

--The truth is a poor defense against meme warriors’ main strategy, which is to overwhelm their audience with false and twisted claims. As Steve Bannon told journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. That was pure anger. Anger and fear are what gets people to the polls….The Democrats don’t matter. The opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to ‘flood the zone with shit.’”

Where does Musk enter this picture?

On May 17, 2020, two months after the pandemic lockdown, Musk tweeted to his followers, “Take the red pill.” As Donovan and crew note when they point this out, Musk had chosen to defy the COVID restrictions mandated by California, keeping his Tesla production lines open and winning praise from Trump. By that point, the pandemic had already been completely politicized, with Trump urging his supporters to “Liberate Michigan!” and “Liberate Illinois!” and “Liberate Wisconsin!” Armed militia members had marched on those state capitols. QAnon was booming. And then George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police and the country arose in protest. On May 29th, Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” prompting Twitter to add its first-ever warning to a presidential tweet, something it would start doing more often.

At no point during these months and the ones that followed did Trump ever lead Biden in the pre-election polls. It’s truly silly to suggest now that biased decisions by Twitter executives cost him the election, but that isn’t stopping Musk, Taibbi, Shellenberger and Weiss from trying to rewrite history. (Facebook and YouTube were never as aggressive as Twitter in trying to warn users about political disinformation or guard against incitement, by the way.) If you were a meme warrior, you were in a constant state of frustration as 2020 unfolded. Enter Hunter Biden’s laptop, whose hard drive Bannon started bragging about at the end of September of that year. For the MAGA right, this was supposed to be their ace, something as politically potent as Wikileaks’ exposure of John Podesta’s emails back in 2016. And it flopped. Even denizens of the /pol/ sub-reddit, a hotbed of red-pilling, complained that they were being overwhelmed by dick pics. Donovan et al speculate that “Hunter’s nudes didn’t have anywhere near the stamina (pun intended, sorry) of the Pizzagate allegations against Clinton [because] a) Hunter was a man and so harder for /pol/ to hate, and b) he appeared to be a virile man who slept with hot women, the kind of alpha male who anons aspired to be.”

“The thing about meme wars,” Donovan and her coauthors write, “is that winning them doesn’t necessarily work out well for the fighters.” They add, “memes can be popular and powerful and persistent while hurting the very people who spread them, and even the causes they represent.” Indeed, hundreds of people who gleefully shared their escapades inside the US Capitol have been arrested by the Justice Department. And after January 6th, Twitter didn’t just ban Trump, it deleted more than 70,000 QAnon-related accounts and kicked off far-right conflict entrepreneurs like Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell and Nick Fuentes.

Now Musk is reinstating all of them, and adding his own sophomoric and dangerous jabs at the “woke mind virus,” which he has elevated to the same level as going to Mars among his current fixations. I can’t prove it, but I suspect he’s told Twitter’s engineers to elevate all of his tweets, because the top of my Twitter home page is riddled with them. He even suggested this past weekend that Yoel Roth, who resigned his post as Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety only weeks ago, may be a pedophile because he is gay and because he expressed interest, while an academic, in making sure that online dating sites protected teenagers from abuse. You might want to laugh, but this isn’t funny—Musk’s tweets about Roth were amplified by Chaya Raichik who runs the @LibsofTikTok account, and now Roth is being flooded with death threats.

In all our years of worrying about the concentrated and unaccountable power of tech overlords like Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t think anyone imagined that someone even more impervious to accountability because of his even greater wealth might someday choose to blatantly weaponize a giant social media platform in bad faith. With Zuck we worried that he might stealthily alter his users’ moods or maybe tilt an election by subtly nudging one side to register or vote more than another. We never imagined a Musk running a Twitter.

What to do? Well, a lot of people are abandoning Twitter for places like the fediverse of Mastodon or startups like Post.news. Since Musk took over Twitter, more than 5.6 million people have opened Mastodon accounts, and as of four days ago Post’s CEO Noam Bardin reported that 154,000 people had opened accounts out of 400,000 on the waitlist. Neither of these moves do much, if anything, to resolve the problem presented by Musk. In the US, there’s not much the government can or should do to restrain political speech. Hitting him in the pocketbook will take a lot of organizing of advertisers and/or billion-dollar defamation lawsuits at the scale of what Dominion Election Systems has done in its own defense against FOX and the OANN network. Before any of that materializes, a lot of damage is going to be done.

Bonus links

—Mike Masnick of Techdirt does the deep dive into Taibbi’s first thread, in case you need a chapter-and-verse level rebuttal.

—Ezra Klein is spot on about why Twitter is not a digital public square, and how today’s internet makes it too easy to talk and too hard to listen. And it’s great to see him elevating pioneers like Taiwan’s digital minister Audrey Tang for their efforts to pave a better path forward.

Odds and Ends

—Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo has gotten the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee, revealing new information about how dozens of Republican members of Congress sought to overturn the election.

—In the Bulwark, Corbin Barthold runs down everything you could possibly want to know about how Republican politicians and consultants spam their grassroots donors, and how they are now brazenly trying to blame Google for blocking more of their spam. Here’s a taste: “At first glance, therefore, it is surprising to see the GOP construct a cause out of brazenly and relentlessly sending emails that may as well say ‘RACKET’ or ‘PONZI SCHEME’ in the subject line. Yet here we are. House Republicans’ ‘Big Tech, Censorship, & Data Task Force’ recently announced that one of its top priorities is to ‘crack down on political bias in email algorithms.’ On second thought, you might grant that the GOP seems to know its intended audience. In banking that its supporters will fail to grasp its underlying goal—to distribute more spam—the party is relying on the same childlike credulity that causes some of those individuals to perk up at the chance of a ‘3400% IMPACT INCREASE.’”

—Crypto-scam boy genius Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested and charged with multiple crimes, including campaign finance violations involving exceeding the limits on allowable donations and giving using cutouts. There are no details yet on who this may involve.