'More insinuation than evidence': Columnist tears apart Elon Musk's 'Twitter Files'

For the past few weeks, tech billionaire Elon Musk has been partnering up with willing reporters to disseminate what he calls the "Twitter Files" — a series of emails and memoranda that purports to reveal how Twitter partnered with federal law enforcement to silence Republicans and various conservative causes on the platform. One of the biggest sore spots has been how a New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop was suppressed as "disinformation" in 2020 — which turned out to be in error.

That being said, wrote columnist Philip Bump from The Washington Post, the documents revealed in the "Twitter Files" don't actually show nefarious intent of any sort.

Rather, they show a good-faith reaction to Russian disinformation and strategically timed leaks from hacked material against Hillary Clinton in 2016, interfering with the election and leading to years of criminal investigations ,and criticism of the insufficient content moderation policies of social media platforms.

"The presidential election had been tainted — perhaps only slightly, but tainted nonetheless — by a hostile foreign actor. It worked because it effectively leveraged American information-sharing systems, including social media sites. As a result, social media companies began implementing more tools aimed at uprooting or disrupting misinformation," wrote Bump. "This context is critical for understanding what happened in 2020. By then, companies like Twitter had (imperfect) systems in place aimed at shutting down false claims or abusive behavior. They and federal law enforcement were on the lookout for efforts by Russia or other foreign powers to interfere with the presidential race once again."

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"That never manifested, at least not in 2020. Instead, two years later, hostile actors pored over a cache of emails to create a damaging narrative more tangentially linked to politics," wrote Bump. "[Musk] wants to reinforce the sense on the right that government actors in the 'Deep State' conspire with the American left to hold power. What’s been presented to date doesn’t show what is alleged by Musk and the writers tasked with picking cherries from Twitter’s email archives. What the actual evidence shows, instead, is an often ad hoc response to what happened in 2016, a response that is at times kludgey or dubious but not one that obviously shows a federal institution trying to reshape an election outcome."

"Information about Twitter’s decision to block sharing of the Post story — a decision quickly reversed — has been published in caches by writers working with Musk," wrote Bump. However, with regard to the idea this was a malicious move to censor conservatives, "he doesn’t have evidence to that effect. The Post’s story is headlined, 'FBI pressured Twitter, sent trove of docs hours before Post broke Hunter laptop story,' capturing the intended narrative. What Shellenberger shows, though, is that the FBI sent documents to Twitter the evening before the first story about the laptop was published — but not what those documents said or even what they dealt with. It’s all insinuation: Hunter Biden’s team had learned about the soon-to-be-released story (as evidenced by an email sent to the repair-shop owner) and, a few hours later, the FBI sent something to Twitter. That’s it."

"The worry isn’t that Musk might nonetheless believe the story he’s presenting the world," concluded Bump. "It’s that so many other people, unable to know what’s being withheld or unable to take the time to understand the fuller context, are eager to believe it too."