#TwitterFiles: Propaganda as “Transparency”
Musk’s takeover of Twitter has created more than a few waves, not the least of which has been #TwitterFiles: a carefully scripted “exposé” of Twitter’s decision-making process and alleged anti-conservative bias in deciding which Tweets to censor, who to ban, etc. It’s been anything but, though you wouldn’t get that from reading rightwing propaganda. Why, here on Medium you can read one Cauf Skivvier prattling the Musk narrative in his Twitter Files: Hunter Biden’s Laptop and the Democrats Masterclass on Election Meddling
He starts off with the mindless Tribalism so common to idiotic, rightwing propaganda:
While we were waiting for the Democrats to ‘circle back’ on the hard questions, they were busy gerrymandering the media landscape to get rid of those same hard questions.
As the recent exposé commissioned by new Twitter honcho Elon Musk made abundantly clear, the Left has a very peculiar, self-serving definition of misinformation: facts that might even be true, but that could lead the public to all the wrong conclusions…
The first paragraph is just empty tribalism to set the tone. The second displays the typical attribution of some thought or action to “the Left” while never providing any basis for the attribution to so many and diverse people.
Even with his frenetic massaging, there’s just not much there, however. Which he admits. Skivvier notes there isn’t “any earth-shattering news,” though he tries to salvage it as an Outrage! by insisting Taibbi’s sad, narrative driven Tweet-thread “beautifully illustrate[s] the corrupt, lascivious relationship between the Democratic Party and the powers that be in American media.”
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Only, it doesn’t. What we get from Taibbi- and later his partner in being Musk’s flunky, is a cherry-picked selection of anecdotes and un-analyzed data. Skivvier has the audacity (or confusion) call Taibbi’s sad effort “analysis,” but there isn’t any in the thread. We get just a repeat of Taibbi’s bad proxy for Twitter’s supposed bias in Skivvier’s piece: the political donations of Twitter employees:
Emails requesting censorship action would come from the Biden Campaign directly into the inbox of aligned Twitter executives, who would “handle” the issues promptly — working in unison as if they were all cogs in the same well-oiled machine. Such harmony is further evidenced by the political contributions made by Twitter staff to each party:
While, to a certain extent, both the Trump and Biden Campaigns had access to the relevant Twitter staff, what Twitter Files makes clear is that there was no balance at all, Twitter was a de facto arm of the Democratic Party media machine.
#TwitterFiles makes no such thing clear. This proxy is useless data. It’s not even close to being information. Things we’d need to know to make the above chart information would be: what percentage of Twitter employees made political contributions? How many were in the decision-making chain with respect to these censorship decisions? Let’s assume all of those involved in the decisions to censor or not never made political contributions: does that change the meaning of the above? Of course it does. But we don’t get that information from Taibbi or Skivvier. We don’t even get an acknowledgement that their proxy is useless noise.
Making it especially stupid, Twitter- and therefore Musk- has the data which would directly show us any bias on Twitter’s part. I don’t know if Musk has given that data to Taibbi and Weiss. If he has, they haven’t shared any part of it. But Musk certainly has the ability to show how many requests came in from everyone who wanted a Tweet or account censored, who made the request and what/who they targeted, and how many resulted in some kind of censorship action. Musk has not only the data, but the information to show us what Twitter’s bias was before he took over. Except: he’s hiding it. I don’t know about you, but when someone has the evidence to prove or disprove their assertions or narratives and doesn’t show it, I get doubts about the honesty or accuracy of those assertions or narratives.
The above is followed by another dishonest narrative:
The concerted effort to suppress the New York Post article about the unorthodox dealings of the Bidens with Ukraine and China was just the event that blew their cover out of the water.
#TwitterFiles shows there wasn’t a “concerted effort” to suppress the New York Post article. On the contrary, Taibbi shows a robust debate among Twitter’s executives, with more than a few questioning if there was any basis within Twitter’s rules to do anything about the article. Others thought it violated several rules. Taibbi dishonestly interprets this for his audience as proof the article didn’t violate any rules, but even the cherry-picked snippets he presents don’t make the case for him. For an “exposé,” there is an jarring lack of transparency by the exposers here. Not that people like Cauf Skivvier are going to question the narrative being fed them.
Skivvier closes with typically idiotic ranting about “Democrats” and “the Left,” pretending the two groups of people are one and the same. I won’t bore you with it.
