Twitter files reveal US corporate duplicity
The recent revelation of Elon Musk on Twitter is perhaps the most damaging one so far.
On Dec 20, Musk, who is Twitter's new CEO, released the latest of what have been designated the "Twitter Files". In a tweet, Musk wrote, "In 2020, (the United States) government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public".
Musk was referring specifically to the FBI, and the information in question was the files from the laptop of then presidential-candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter. Polls suggest those files would have severely damaged his father's campaign.
The Twitter Files themselves are getting harder for the legacy media to ignore, as each revelation seems more damaging than the previous ones.
The damaging totality of these internal documents and emails from Twitter's various department heads is proving what many saw happen in real time during the 2020 US presidential election, in which Democratic candidate Biden beat Republican Donald Trump, the incumbent.
The files show Twitter's complete corporate duplicity then: outwardly maintaining that its punitive actions against some users were to ensure compliance with the platform's ambiguous Community Guidelines. In actuality, Musk's revelations show, Twitter's previous leadership was politically biased against journalists and users who did not align with the platform leadership's subjective biases.
This was despite Twitter's continued assertion that the platform is merely an objective "public square" where all are welcome to share their opinions, even after they banned a sitting US president from their supposed public square.
The Twitter Files show the platform behaved more like an editorializing publisher and not an objective public square. This is a legal distinction whose importance cannot be understated, as other social media platforms also navigate this distinction to consciously avoid being considered "publishers".
Here's why: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 says, "No provider or user of an interactive computer shall betreated as publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This means that online platforms hosting the written speech of users are protected from the legal ramifications of its platform being used for libel, defamation or hate speech. Identifying as a "public square" affords social media platforms this legal protection.
The Twitter Files show conclusively that Twitter was not acting as an objective public square.
The consequences of the revelation of this corrupt and nondemocratic corporate culture and its collusion with government agencies have been more damaging than they initially appear.
Musk's recent release of the Twitter Files, which everyone is pretending isn't an elephant in the room, shows exactly what type of actions that Molly Ball, writing in Time magazine in 2021, referred to as "fortifying" the 2020 presidential election. This included actions such as the FBI giving millions of dollars to keep some content from spreading on social media.
Former president Trump is polarizing, and people usually either hate him for his words or love him for his actions, with people in the middle starting to quietly focus more on his actions than his words.
But we also now have hindsight, and if we're honest, we see clearly that military action was his least favorite political tool as president. It's important to remember that the only time the legacy media had a kind word to say about Trump was when he ordered an airstrike in Syria.
Hindsight shows us something else: The very presence of Trump was indeed a massive threat — but not to the normal, globally minded citizens who pay attention to geopolitics and just want to live peaceful lives. With the release of the increasingly damaging Twitter Files, we see that his presence was a bigger threat to the illusion of the inherent evenhandedness of the US democratic process.
The author is a writer and historian based in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
