Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Bombshell Goes Off With a Whimper

In a lengthy Twitter thread Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi released information from files provided to him by Elon Musk. The new owner of the social media platform had promised transparency about past content moderation decisions that occurred during the 2020 campaign, in particular, of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which he sees as ground zero in a national discussion about free speech and the First Amendment.

First, some necessary background…In October 2020, just weeks before Election Day, the Post published a salacious story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The information came to them via Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to then-President Donald Trump, in the form of a hard drive with information taken from the computer, said to be left at a Delaware computer store.

The vast amount of information revealed at that time from the laptop has since been verified as legitimate. But at the time, given the provenance of the information and Giuliani’s disinclination to share the source material with any other news outlets, the story was met with great skepticism. Outlets chose not to aggregate the Post report and followed warnings from former US Intelligence officials who signed a letter saying that the Hunter data had all the markings of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Twitter got involved in the story in a pretty significant way. First, the platform suspended the Twitter account of the Post. It also deleted and suspended anyone who shared the story. Twitter eventually reversed that decision and reactivated the New York Post Twitter account along with countless others banned for sharing the Hunter Biden story. Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted during a congressional hearing that they made a mistake and had they done it all over, they would have handled it differently.

Many conservatives saw that as cold comfort, arguing that had the story not been banned and largely ignored by most news outlets, Trump would have won the 2020 election. There are no facts that support that idea, only feelings. In fact, if I may speak feelingly: the story arguably received far more attention because it was censored by Twitter. Ever since the aggressive moderation of the laptop story has been used as a larger cudgel by conservatives convinced that “Big Tech” is creating an unfair landscape.

Former President Trump weighed in on the new revelations from Musk in a statement on Truth Social, “So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION.”

No, there will be no new election, nor do you declare a new winner. But this is the sort of outrage that was created by Taibbi’s thread.

The outrage has been stoked by Musk himself, who gleefully previewed and promoted its revelations.

Matt Taibbi is a well-respected journalist known for his iconoclastic takes. Conservatives love to call him a progressive or liberal writer, though most progressives and liberals I know really want nothing to do with him. It’s this outlier status in today’s Balkanized political media ecosystem that explains why Musk chose him to report on the files.

Now, to the story itself.

On his TK News Substack, Taibbi wrote:

The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

It is not clear what his conditions were. Again, Taibbi has —in the past at least — enjoyed some level of bipartisan respect (and animus), so there isn’t a clear history of hackery to be skeptical about the conditions apart from traditional journalistic standards. If he cannot explain Musk’s “conditions,” then it’s difficult to take his reporting as much more than a public relations narrative. More on that later…

So Taibbi dropped a Twitter thread featuring roughly three dozen tweets. The vast majority outline stuff that was already known, that the laptop tweets were blocked due to a “hacked information” standard that raises an entirely other conversation about what information is “hacked” and what is not. One person’s “whistleblower” is another person’s leaker…

The key tweet was the eighth in the thread and the one that conservatives have largely pounced on:

This is clear evidence of First Amendment infringement, some vocal conservatives have proclaimed. Buck Sexton even called for the impeachment of President Joe Biden based on the tweet.

A few crucial details prove Sexton’s folly.

The screenshot that Taibbi shared is clearly dated October 24th, 2020. Joe Biden was not president at the time. His team reaching out to have tweets removed was a campaign issue, not a government one. David French made this very point on Twitter:

Moreover, it’s been widely reported that many of the links the Biden team asked Twitter to remove were pornographic photos of Hunter Biden — a fact omitted by Taibbi — in violation of Twitter’s standards.

The celebrating from the right has also ignored Taibbi’s revelation in the tenth tweet in the thread:

Now he uses this note as a setup to reasonably point out that there is a clear political bias among Twitter’s staff, which he illustrates by political donations from staffers. But he also reports that the Trump White House requested tweets to be removed that were “received and honored” by Twitter. If Biden’s requests in October of 2024 raise a red flag, then surely the same standard should be held to Trump.

Now it’s almost certain that the Biden White House has continued a dialog with Twitter about inflammatory tweets. Nearly every significant media outlet and institution has a relationship with Twitter — it is how they do business. It is NOT clear, however, that the Biden White House has engaged explicitly in requests for censorship as Taibbi appears to be suggesting.

In short, this “bombshell” Friday night reveals is remarkably short on bombshells. Or, as New York Post writer and frequent Fox News guest Miranda Devine flatly said to Tucker Carlson, there was “not really the smoking gun we had hoped for.”

I spoke with Mediaite founder, and all-around very smart guy, Dan Abrams about this convoluted story, and he said, “It is stunning that with access to all the internal e-mails at Twitter that they don’t have a single smoking gun that implicates a government leader or even any campaign in wrongdoing. Even before Musk’s characterization of what was there, I expected there would be something more damning. . . from someone relevant.”

Requests to take down private porn don’t implicate the First Amendment, they don’t suggest a grand effort at censorship and they certainly don’t prove a conspiracy to impact the outcome of the election. Heck, Gawker got put out of business for publishing improperly accessed private porn.

Now Taibbi has promised more information to come. And what he reported Friday night is a fascinating look at how executives at Twitter inserted themselves into partisan debates in a manner that we’ve never seen before, because, well, weaponized social media information (on both sides) is part of a brave new world we are all trying to get a grip on.

Again, we don’t know what “conditions” Taibbi agreed to. We do know that his ballyhooed Twitter files thread was short on facts and long on a narrative that suits Elon Musk and conservatives that have been quick to deify his “first amendment” rights position.

So if this is part of a deeply cynical PR campaign, then why would Musk employ Taibbi to engage? What’s the upside?

Well, Twitter has become an exciting place under Musk’s leadership for good and bad reasons. And that’s in large part to Musk’s effective carnival barking. He’s calling attention to the spectacle and, at the same time, appealing to a conservative audience who had grown deeply skeptical of Twitter and essentially believed that there were conspiracies afloat. We usually use the term “conspiracy theorist” dismissively, but if some conspiracy theories are accurate, is it paranoia?

That said, what Taibbi reported was newsworthy and interesting. The problem was in his framing and the expectations set by Musk. This appeared to be a narrative-setting spectacle and not the bombshell it was promised. In other words, it was a dud.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.