Elon Musk’s Twitter Files Say a Lot More About Him Than Twitter

Right-wingers are reveling in the latest batch of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, which Republicans continue to dubiously frame as bombshell revelations into the platform’s squelching of far-right accounts. But amid all the brouhaha, a simple question remains: What new information has actually emerged from these splashy document dumps?

On Thursday night, Bari Weiss—a former New York Times columnist with whom Musk is collaborating to prove that Twitter’s former leadership silenced conservatives—accused the platform of seeking to “build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.” The allegations came in a lengthy series of tweets, which cited internal company data and communications given to Weiss by Musk’s team. Among the right-wingers allegedly targeted were talk radio host Dan Bongino, who was put on a “search blacklist,” and anti-lockdown doctor Jay Bhattacharya, who was assigned to a “trends blacklist” that prevented his tweets from trending.

In the eyes of the right, Weiss’s reporting is smoking-gun evidence that Twitter’s past leadership employed “shadow banning”—a broadly defined term that can entail limiting the engagement, visibility, or searchability of a user—to persecute conservatives, despite insisting they did not.

In reality, Weiss’s thread lacks the context that would otherwise paint a complete picture of Twitter’s content-moderation policies. The public still doesn’t know how many accounts were actually “shadow-banned,” why they were targeted, and the political persuasions of those who were—the last of which is particularly important, given the fact that several prominent leftist and anti-fascist users have been suspended during Musk’s short tenure. All that can be gleaned from the latest Twitter Files release is this: Musk, likely under pressure from spooked advertisers to justify his conservative rebrand of the company, wants everyone to know that at least a few right-wing users were sent to varying degrees of Twitter time-out.

Funnily enough, as Twitter continues to lose ad revenue, Musk has personally promised to double down on some of the very practices mentioned in Weiss’s reporting. “We will continue to aggressively de-amplify hate speech on our platform,” wrote Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, in a post last week, before repeating Musk’s new favorite mantra: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.” Rather than banning speech or figures that make advertisers uncomfortable, Musk, a self-pronounced “free speech absolutist,” appears to be betting that a “shadow banning” compromise will stop his new company from hemorrhaging.

However, he has yet to explain what his definition of “hate speech” is or outline what content will be subject to restrictions. Shortly before suspending rapper Kanye “Ye” West for tweeting an image of a swastika, Twitter reinstated the accounts of lesser-known white supremacists and other prior offenders banned by Twitter’s old regime. So far, it seems that to Musk, objectionable speech is anything that might give him a public-relations headache.