The two journalists Bari Weiss, who started editing Substack newsletter named The Free Press leaving New York Times, and Matt Taibbi, who started publishing TK News, another newsletter on Substack, leaving Rolling Stone, are the new Twitter sensations.
Twitter has been rattled by the two revelations of these two personalities whom the world of journalism views as polarizing, and those revelations are named Twitter Files: part 1 and Twitter Files: part 2.
Twitter owner Elon Musk himself introduced the thread, said it would be awesome, and retweeted it. The overall saga triggered a series of accusations and justifications, and the North American media is divided over its reliability.
Twitter Files: part 1
The first part of Twitter Files raised alleged the social media platform of suppressing the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
The report included leaked e-files containing alleged email communications of Hunter Biden. The communications occurred in 2015 while Joe was the Vice-President to Barrack Obama and contained information on Hunter’s business deals in Ukraine.
According to the Post, Joe Biden’s son introduced him to one of the top Ukrainian energy firm’s top executives a year before he forced Ukraine officials to fire a prosecutor probing the company.
Taibbi claimed that Twitter’s steps to suppress the incident were “extraordinary.” Twitter blocked New York Post and stopped the users from sharing the stories by Post, even through private messages, for some time.
Even Post had to face Twitter suspension for two weeks as they didn’t want to revert from a story posted on the same incident.
The then-CEO Jack Dorsey at that time regretted the decision. Later, Biden clarified that Russia planted it.
1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Twitter Files: part 2
Bari Weiss came up with the second part of Twitter Files on December 9, with a thread of 31 tweets, alleging Twitter of building ‘blacklists’ to limit the visibility of the users regarding accounts or trending topics without letting them know.
Weiss mentioned incidents like putting Jay Bhattacharya on a “trend blacklist” for opposing COVID lockdowns and suspending an anti-LGBT account, citing it as “hateful conduct.”
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
What about media and public? Did they trust?
The media in North America got divided when it came to whether to trust Twitter Files. Some media houses expressed their wish to reveal everything at a time.
The conflict became interesting when Elon Musk threw a teaser about the second part, and co-founder Jack Dorsey responded.
Looks like we will need another day or so
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 4, 2022
Musk left no option for the media other than not to report by stating they can’t report on things without confirming them, said an editorial by WSJ.
Twitter’s former Head of Product Kavyon Beykpour, said that the microblogging site hasn’t ever denied de-amplifying content and ranked posts.
wow. did you even read the blog post? We never denied de-amplifying things. In fact we made clear that we do rank. We defined exactly what we meant by “shadow banning” (b/c there are many definitions) and made very clear that we didn’t do *that*…
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) December 9, 2022
The consequences
The Twitter Files made the American right to go on the attack and even triggered allegations of illegitimacy in the 2020 elections. Musk said he now wants a twitter 2.0 with features like encrypted direct messages.
