Home ›› 22 Dec 2022 ›› Editorial
Last week, two large dumps of what were originally assumed to be private conversations demonstrated the depth of discord among Americans. But the differences between the two sets of conversations and reactions to them are stark and revealing.
New Twitter owner Elon Musk sent private correspondence from within the company before he took over to several bloggers to try to prove it had been highly biased against the right and, especially, former US president Donald Trump. The political news website Talking Points Memo published 2,319 text messages to and from then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as Republicans sought to overturn the 2020 election, setting the stage for the January 6 insurrection.
The failed coup remains the biggest dividing line in a fractured American polity. That is likely to get worse as the January 6 Committee is expected to recommend serious criminal charges against Mr Trump at their final hearing on Monday. They plan to urge the Department of Justice to charge Mr Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the US, and, most significantly, insurrection.
It is just a recommendation, but it will further damage him. Mr Trump faces possible indictment in Georgia, related to the effort to overturn the election there. New York prosecutors are re-examining his payment of hush money to two of his former paramours. Mr Trump's then attorney, Michael Cohen, who made the payments, was sentenced to three years in prison.
Mr Trump's "major announcement" last week turned out to be an astonishingly cheesy offer of $99 virtual NFT "trading cards" depicting the former president in various pseudo-heroic poses. Even his closest allies expressed disgust at the demeaning spectacle, reminiscent of the worst late-night television.
In this context, Mr Musk released his "Twitter files" to several bloggers, urging them to demonstrate that the company conspired to support Democrats and harm Republicans, especially Mr Trump. Yet the messages don't demonstrate anything of the kind. What they show is an overwhelmed company struggling, and often failing badly, to establish and enforce reasonable and consistent content standards. That much was already obvious.
The messages reveal the former Twitter leaders were liberals, made mistakes, and blundered by blocking tweets linking to a New York Post article about a laptop supposedly belonging to President Joe Biden's son Hunter immediately before the 2020 election. Twitter even briefly suspended the Post's account, demanding they delete all references to the story, which Twitter suspected might have been Russian disinformation.
Amid an enormous backlash, the ban was quickly lifted. Twitter admitted it was a huge error. The "Twitter files" show the messy, often unpleasant, sausage-making that went into that aggressively pursued mistake. The right is indignantly insisting the messages demonstrate that Twitter, and they imply all major social media before Mr Musk, was constantly conspiring against conservatives and plotting to promote a liberal agenda. That is a considerable exaggeration. These "files" don't alter the essential narrative most sensible Americans have long ago concluded regarding these well-known Twitter controversies.
Moreover, the "files" are not being released in full, or with any transparency. They are being selectively published by certain bloggers selected by Mr Musk. The project would be a lot more credible if the public were shown the entire "files" rather than carefully curated titbits.
Mr Musk's arbitrary and authoritarian content management is infinitely more biased and less systematic than his predecessors. He has welcomed back some of the worst bad actors and suspended the accounts of those who have apparently annoyed him. He was even threatened with EU sanctions because of these abuses.
Whatever their failings, his predecessors were at least trying to establish a system and a clear process. For Mr Musk, “le tweet c'est moi". At least he seems to be having a jolly good time.
By contrast, the Mark Meadows text messages are deeply alarming. The former chief of staff provided them to the January 6 committee before he suddenly cut off all co-operation in December 2021.
The National
