What to make of the Twitter Files? | The Economist

“Twitter”, Elon Musk wrote on December 10th, on the website he owns and runs, “is both a social-media company and a crime scene”. Mr Musk’s crime scene is described in the “Twitter Files”, a set of screenshots of the social-media company’s internal communications. They were taken mostly from Slack, a workplace messaging app, and given to three freelance journalists by Twitter’s current staff, at Mr Musk’s direction. They relate to moderation decisions taken by Twitter before Mr Musk bought the company. The “Files” have been published in a hard-to-follow stream of at least 225 tweets over the past two weeks, the most recent set emerging on December 12th.To understand what is important about the Files, it helps to be clear about what they are not. They are not a systematic examination of Twitter’s content-moderation choices. This has not stopped Mr Musk, and the journalists to whom he has given access, claiming that the files offer damning evidence of Twitter’s institutional bias against Republicans, driven by a staff who wanted to censor ideas and people who made them uncomfortable.Perhaps the most important thing the Files do is demolish the notion that a centrally controlled entity can write down a set of
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