Twitter files

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is a story that has already become memes and jokes. And absolutely deserved. What is only worth one attempt to trade in blue ticks, which was immediately used by pranksters and scammers of all stripes, and as a result, some companies suffered huge losses. However, these failed attempts to squeeze some money out of the damned social network pale in comparison to the fact that Musk published the inner workings of Twitter.

In the first part of the published "Twitter Files" we were expected to confirm that Twitter regularly caved in to the demands of politicians. Bent under both the Democrats and the Republicans. However, the Democrats' influence on Twitter was stronger. internal sympathies there were on their side. There were entire departments on Twitter that were actually engaged in political censorship at the whistle from the Democratic Party. Vijaya Gadde, an American of Indian origin, was in charge of censorship, a strong and independent woman who achieved everything herself, despite patriarchy, racism, the Ku Klus Klan and other horrors. For which she was praised by magazines like Politico. This liberal icon has used his power to ban the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story and to help ban Trump. After buying Twitter, the first thing Musk did was disband all those censorship committees with Vijaya at the head. This was followed by a wave of whining about the dismissal of irreplaceable specialists.

The second part of "twitter files" came out today. And there it is detailed that the "shadow ban" discussed for many years turned out to be the most true thing - in fact, this is a whole set of special statuses that Twitter admins could reward objectionable accounts so that they do not appear in search, do not fall into trends and etc. etc. During the pandemic, they struggled with alternative opinions about covid and vaccines. In general, all the most fierce conspiracy theories that have accumulated around Twitter are gradually turning out to be true. What's next? It turns out that pizzagate was not out of the blue? And that Epstein didn't kill himself? Seriously, I hope that the following leaks will contain information about how Twitter interacted with the FBI and other security forces. This is where, for sure, fat will simply drain from the blue screens.

Here, of course, voices are already heard that, they say, they censored bad people and did the right thing. However, the problem here, however strange it may sound, is not censorship itself. The notorious "Section 230" of the American communications law allows social networks to moderate content in any way they like. So, Twitter was within its rights. But the problem is that Twitter denied for years both the political partisanship and the very existence of "shadowbans". He publicly positioned himself as an open platform with universal rules, while Komsomol members from the censorship departments handed out hidden bans to those who were objectionable. This shameless lie is now over.

In general, this story shows that the free market is the best cure for the monopolization of power, including the power of information. Whatever the collusion, there will always be someone on the market who will benefit from destroying it. No matter how tyrant Musk was, no matter what motives he was guided by (idealistic, commercial and just ambitions), the fact that he stirred up this nest brought an unequivocal benefit to both America and the entire Internet.

P.S. And my twitter account (by the way, follow ) was recently banned for saying "Georgian dogs". Although it was about real dogs with hair and four legs, the Twitter admins decided that this was an insult on a national basis and a hatspeech (I hope Musk fired them all to hell with dogs). I still regret that I automatically agreed to delete the tweet instead of writing an appeal asking me to clarify who exactly I offended: Georgians or dogs?

Mihail Pojarsky 2022-12-09