In October 2022, Elon Musk took over as the CEO of Twitter, after buying it for $44 billion.
This was followed by firing almost 75% of Twitter staff.
Many people felt that these layoffs would make Twitter unusable or that Twitter would lose users as a result of the negative publicity being received by the company.
Twitter continued to function just fine, facing the same number of blackouts as it did before the layoffs. But what happened was that this made the rest of Big Tech (Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.) think of their own workforce. A spate of layoffs followed in the industry.
This post is not about Twitter layoffs. The layoffs helped Musk reach out to a lot of the internal content of Twitter – its emails, slack channels, etc. , without facing resistance or layers of hiding tactics.
(Slack is a technology that allows people to share chat messages or post messages on a group. Usually these groups are around a specific interest or location).
In December 2022, Musk started releasing internal documents of Twitter. These documents were released on Twitter, with the hashtag #TwitterFiles.
A Hashtag is denoted by this symbol – # before text. The hashtag indicates the subject of the content. It helps the internal indexing of a technology like Twitter, Meta, etc. For example, if you post a video about #SummerHolidays, adding a hashtag(#) to that content will help the platform search and display that content faster when someone searches for “Summer Holidays”.
So, what is Twitter Files?
Twitter Files is the internal secrets of how Twitter did illegal things. They were released from Twitter Files 1.0 to 17.0.
Elon Musk released the internal documents that proved that Twitter had:
A. Denied the blue tick of verification to people who were not communists, or otherwise, based on their ideology. This is because Twitter and its founder, Jack Dorsey, were leftist.
B. Actively blacklisted or limited the visibility of some profiles and some tweets. They did this because of their own ideology, AND because FBI ordered them to. They followed the instructions of FBI to block individual accounts and to limit the visibility of some specific threads. Most of these threads supported President Trump. Twitter did not allow the supporters of Trump to spread their message.
C. Hid all details about the corruption case against Hunter Biden, the son of the current US president, Joe Biden. Twitter did not allow the publication of tweets that shared evidence against Hunter Biden. It did not even allow posts that asked questions related to Hunter Biden’s “Consulting” fees. This content was hidden till the end of US elections. Till Biden was elected to power, the Hunter Biden content was hidden. (Update: On the morning of 21st June 2023 (IST), Hunter Biden has pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges and firearm charges).
D. Banned Trump from its platform permanently even though Trump specifically asked his supporters to maintain peace. Twitter limited the visibility of that tweet by Trump. This means that Trump supporters could not see this peace appeal by Trump!
E. Twitter Files 17 was about India. A research body sent a list of 40,000 users who were identified as “supporters of Hindu nationalism” and their accounts had to be censored.
F. Twitter Files 16 was about how the mainstream media completely ignored the valuable information shared in the Twitter files.
G. Twitter Files 15 and 14 exposed how certain interests in the US worked to prove that Trump was involved with Russians and that the Russians had somehow influenced American presidential elections. The Russia involvement was a big part of the American dialogue for many months – from 2018 to the elections in 2020.
H. Giving the Ukrainian government a hand by blocking the reach of journalists not liked by them.
I. Some part of Twitter Files is also about how the government, once Trump was defeated, worked hard to push research that was not entirely proven, to create an environment of mandatory vaccination, mask wearing, and other Covid protocols. We are not covering those in this article.
The Mainstream Media response to Twitter Files
The mainstream media did not report on the Twitter files at all. No mention was made of these internal documents in any mainstream media organisation in any part of the world.
After the release, however, many mainstream media outlets published articles indicating that the Twitter Files is not true.
In going through these articles, however, we did not find any evidence to support that the Twitter Files is untrue.
Some media outlets have indicated that only some of the documents have been shared and not all. However, there are no internal documents that show that what was indicated in the Twitter Files was not happening. There is no communication that, even internally, contradicts or criticises the actions of Twitter.
The effect of Twitter Files
Top Twitter executives appeared in a hearing before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on February 8, 2023, in Washington, DC.
On March 9, 2023, a Congressional hearing was also held as a result of Twitter Files. Some selective questions are reproduced below:
The two-hour hearing can be viewed here.