By Freddy Gray
December 09, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "The
Spectator" -
As I
wrote earlier, last week Matt Taibbi, the
journalist chosen by Elon Musk to reveal what
really happened behind-the-app during the 2020
presidential election, published the first
instalment of the ‘Twitter Files’. He did it as
a long Twitter ‘thread’ which showed various
panicky corporate communications about the
ethics of suppressing intriguing political
information. This was important stuff but it
wasn’t exactly explosive. We all knew that Big
Tech censored information in order to help Joe
Biden. Lots of Democrat-friendly journalists
were therefore quick to pour cold water on the
news. Nothing to see here, folks, move on.
But Musk and Taibbi promised more and last
night Taibbi dropped a genuinely shocking
‘supplemental thread’ explaining why the Twitter
files had not been quite as sensational as some
hoped. It seems that, without Musk’s knowledge,
somebody within the organisation had been
vetting the files which Taibbi and Bari Weiss —
the other journalist Musk has anointed to do the
story — were allowed to see. And that somebody
was Jim Baker, the former FBI general counsel
who, extraordinarily enough, has the title of
Twitter Deputy General Counsel. Or rather he
did. Musk sacked him yesterday.
Baker is, as Taibbi puts it, ‘something of a
Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016…
He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into
leaks to the press.’
Yikes. Any intelligent commentator who
doesn’t recognise this as a potentially enormous
scandal is being wilfully blind at best. What is
increasingly clear is that the FBI and Twitter
were working hand-in-glove to suppress what they
deemed to be ‘misinformation’ — which actually
turned out to be a true story about the now
President’s son. The level of ‘collusion’ — to
use a word we heard a lot in relation to Russia
and Trump in 2016 — between law enforcement
agencies, partisan political actors, and Big
Tech is starting to become painfully clear. Bari
Weiss will deliver the next batch of Twitter
files — on Twitter, natch — and the story has
only got more interesting. The old defence of
Twitter was that it was a private company and in
a free world a private company can publish or
not publish whatever it wants. But what if that
private company is being manipulated by state
actors?
Another interesting aspect: one of the main
figures involved in suppressing the — true,
remember — Hunter Biden story was Vijaya Gadde,
Twitter’s former ‘legal, public policy, and
trust and safety lead’. The Biden administration
later gave her an advisory role at the the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, which is an arm of the Department of
Homeland Security. That seems fishy, to put it
mildly.
Twitter is a global company and so the
inevitable next question is: did the website
also restrict politically sensitive content on
the request of partisan or security agency
actors in other countries too? Did it — to use
another hot term from 2016 — engage in ‘foreign
interference’?
If so, where? Musk has already hinted that he
will look into allegations that ‘Twitter
personnel’ were giving preference to left-wing
candidates in Brazil. What about the United
Kingdom? Why, for instance, was the
trouble-causing Twitter account
Politics for All nuked? These are questions
worth exploring, especially as Parliament
considers the Online Safety Bill — which is
partly designed to protect the public from our
unhealthy habit of sharing too much.
Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The
Spectator
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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