Twitter No Longer Has a Content Moderation Policy—and Appears to Be Hiding First Amendment Violations By the Trump White House While Viciously Targeting Twitter’s Progressives
America’s once-dominant political water cooler can’t convince advertisers or users it has a content moderation policy. There’s a good reason for that: it doesn’t. But it does have a partisan agenda.
Introduction
For years now, major-media reports establish, far-right Twitter users have exploited loopholes in the company’s content moderation policies to try to censor, suspend, and ban their perceived enemies: primarily, journalists and researchers who traffic in facts rather than emotionalized rhetoric.
This long-running right-wing campaign has been accompanied—as one might expect, considering that many of its executors are self-described “trolls”—by concurrent false allegations that the trolls’ opponents are acting just as the trolls themselves have been.
Indeed, as PC Magazine reported exactly one year ago today, no group has been as invested in using Twitter policies to cancel their critics as far-right actors on Twitter.
“It's reportedly taken less than a week for members of the far-right to abuse Twitter’s updated private information policy to have journalists and researchers banned from the platform”, the trusted tech-industry mag revealed on December 5, 2021, citing a Washington Post report that found “coordinated and malicious reports” of journalists and academics alleging violating Twitter’s new prohibition against sharing “media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.” The policy had an exception for “public figures” that Twitter apparently didn’t know how to properly enforce in late 2021, creating the loophole the far right would quickly exploit to spectacular effect.
Twitter’s Fall 2021–instituted “media of private individuals” policy was certainly an echo of a brouhaha the platform had witnessed a little over a year earlier, in Fall 2020, when far-right activists on the platform somehow decided that posting pictures of private citizen Hunter Biden’s exposed penis would swing the 2020 presidential election to Donald Trump. (Why voters would care about this was never made clear.)
Ironically, in late 2020 the questions Twitter’s content moderators had about the pics of Hunter Biden’s privates weren’t about the use of “media of private individuals”—though they likely should have been, in the view of both Twitter in 2021 and that of the far-right agitators who gleefully supported a ban on media of private individuals when it emerged late in that year—but rather whether the laptop that the images of private citizen Hunter Biden were found on had been stolen, hacked, tampered with, planted, or otherwise acquired via illegal means.
In short, Twitter’s trained moderators and top executives worried that posting images of Hunter Biden’s penis as a political stunt mere days before a presidential election in which private-citizen Hunter’s very much public-figure father Joe Biden was one of two candidates could be not just aiding and abetting a late-campaign political dirty trick of the sort the Republican Party had become known for over the preceding few election cycles but also allowing criminal content on its platform. Perhaps it is worth noting, here, that when Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter in October 2022 he quickly announced a new content moderation policy that would forbid only “criminal” content on the platform—a policy that was immediately publicly lauded by the very far-right activists who had, two years earlier, not only blasted Twitter for blocking content Twitter not unreasonably feared was ill-gotten but had since spent two years claiming that the said content was blocked because of a far-left conspiracy at Twitter rather than a content moderation policy encompassing the one they would celebrate when it was announced by their hero, Musk.
(It is worth noting here, too, that Musk’s claim that only criminal content would be blocked from Twitter was never a serious policy proposal. Certain nations, like Germany, have prohibitions against hate speech that would cause Twitter to be permanently banned in Europe—one of the markets Musk most wants to expand Twitter usage in—if Musk did not move quickly to block certain forms of speech on Twitter, and not just criminally obtained or crime-constituting tweeted material.)
It was against all this backdrop that, on December 1, 2022, Musk revealed that he had leaked reams of internal corporate email correspondence to controversial freelance journalist Matt Taibbi and Substack agitator Bari Weiss for the purpose of having them “report” on it. If this was a highly unusual maneuver—an allegedly politically neutral digital platform (indeed, a platform whose new owner claimed that political neutrality was his cherished watchword) leaking the private correspondence of private individuals containing private contact information to known right-wing authors no longer deemed credible journalists by a sizable percentage of U.S. news consumers—certainly there was no complaint whatsoever from the far-right trolls and agitators who for years had sought to exploit such idiosyncratic loopholes (whether negligent or designed) in Twitter’s handling of sensitive content to wound their political enemies.
Still, the irony of Musk leaking correspondence between Twitter and left-wing actors like the DNC or the 2020 Biden campaign to a duo of decidedly right-wing actors—thereby doing no more than repeating the very error he claimed his predecessors at Twitter HQ had made—can’t and won’t pass here without comment, even if the irony appeared to be lost on all three of Musk, Taibbi, and Weiss.
If the ethos behind Musk leaking private correspondence to two politically motivated actors was suspect, so too was the process by which he did so. In the early afternoon of December 1, Musk announced to his nearly 120 million Twitter followers—the largest number of followers for any Twitter account this side of Barack Obama’s—that the result of his formerly secretive partnership with conservative authors Taibbi and Weiss would be published on Twitter in three hours. Shortly thereafter, however, he announced that his big corporate-political-axis reveal would be delayed to allow for additional “double-checking [of] some facts” that for unknown reasons hadn’t been completed at the time of his original announcement.
The sloppiness of both Musk’s original announcement and (presumably) the work of his compatriots appeared to be underscored by the giddiness with which Musk had announced the publication of a ream of content evidently not ready for primetime.
In the event, the release of the “Twitter Files” (as Musk and Taibbi dubbed them) was delayed much more than 40 minutes, suggesting that much more than two-thirds-of-an-hour’s worth of fact-checking remained to be completed on what turned out to be just the first part of a surprisingly sparse run of content.
The Twitter thread carnival-barkered by a private-company CEO (Musk) and finally posted by a man not reasonably positioned in this narrative as a far-right activist (Taibbi)—constituting a partnership Musk pointedly described with the first-person collective “we” (see image above)—ultimately held nothing of public interest, as was quickly acknowledged even by conservative digital media outlet The Bulwark. It was that outlet that memorably wrote, in a lengthy article entitled “No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter”,
While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.
Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.
Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.
None of this pushback to the highly unusual Musk-Taibbi corporation-and-media collaboration precluded far-right trolls from seeking to make hay out of nothing, however. As the Bulwark further observed (citations omitted, emphasis in original):
Right-wing commentator Buck Sexton said this [the correspondence between Twitter moderators and private citizens involved in partisan political efforts discussed by Musk and Taibbi] was a “bright red line violation” and that Biden should be impeached for it.
Rep. James Comer (R-TN) was on Fox News promising that everyone at Twitter involved with this would be brought before the House Oversight Committee. Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) retweeted several MAGA influencers praising Elon for, among other things, “exposing corruption at the highest levels of society” (Projection Alert).
Meanwhile Kari Lake hype man [and] “Pizzagate” [originator] Jack Posobiec declared this the “biggest story in modern presidential election history”, claimed that “we can never go back to the country we were before this moment”, and [dubbed] this [exchange between Twitter and private citizens] “a digital insurrection.”
But surely the most stunningly melodramatic (and feigned) indignant overreaction to Taibbi’s thread—which had revealed nothing more than Twitter receiving complaints about certain tweets from private citizens, as it does daily in the thousands or even tens of thousands—came from former president Donald Trump, who used the Musk-Taibbi non-story to publicly demand that the United States immediately “terminat[e] all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”, for the sole purpose of “throw[ing] the presidential election results of 2020 out and declar[ing] [him] the rightful winner.” Or, he offered magnanimously, the nation could execute a similarly self-admittedly illegal and unconstitutional maneuver to merely “have a new election.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republican elected officials remained almost entirely silent in the face of Trump’s public calls for insurrection against the democratically elected government of the United States, even as outlets like The Bulwark wrote that “Trump writing that we should cancel the Constitution ranks right up alongside John Tyler’s support of the Confederacy as among the most shameful acts of a former president in our nation’s history.”
What Trump’s historic, pro-Sedition outburst did do, however, was open up a can of worms at Twitter—revealing the dark story of how content moderation at Twitter has now collapsed in service of a far-right partisan agenda that Elon Musk (for his own, eldritch reasons) seeks to advance posthaste. The Proof report that follows tells the harrowing story of this agenda and its mechanisms.
{Note: Past major-media reports have revealed that Twitter has always, contra the insistent claims of the far right, had an “algorithmic bias” that favors “right-wing politicians and news outlets”—a bias Twitter has publicly admitted. So the information in this Proof report should be taken as a sudden, startling, Elon Musk–born intensification of a years-long trend that America’s far-right activists and their quasi-journalistic enablers have long tried to deny.}