I don’t give a shit about the Twitter files. I am, famously, not a fan of Twitter, as I see it as the virtual space in which conformity is rigidly enforced. I was guilty, notoriously, of very bad behavior on Twitter, which led to a public shunning of me that was predictable, understandable, and justified. For the five years since that happened, I have considered my Twitter privileges revoked, and I will go on feeling that way. I do check the service twice a week for a half-hour or hour or so, as I find it’s necessary to keep up with “the conversation,” given that I do a lot of media criticism. But I’m a proud Twitter hater, both because I’m a pretentious snowflake and because Twitter’s format genuinely is terrible for our discourse and our collective psyches and the whole thing should be nuked from orbit.
The Twitter Files are important for everyone to understand and be upset about, not because Twitter (and Google and Facebook) are politically biased, but because they are biased toward "the Machine," the elite establishment and entrenched bureaucracy that run this country (if not the globe) for their own benefit and always have, to be honest, but are less and less doing people the favor of trying to maintain the illusion that that is not in fact true. In other words, if you want to produce change in this country or leave any semblance of power in the hands of the people, rather than turning them into a serf class, you will understand how all these big tech companies along with your "Maw" attempt to force people to live in a pseudo reality of their own creation, one where everything people physically experience doesn't matter. We're supposed to accept what the "experts" and talking heads tell us is truth rather than our own eyes. That is the lesson of the Twitter files.
And being "right-coded" these days simply means you refuse to buy into that reality or accept that they *should* have the power to create that reality. It has absolutely nothing to do with your principles or politics. And that, my friend, is frightening because in that pseudo-reality, anyone "right-coded" is considered a danger to the "people's," the "democracy's," the "country's" (read: the Machine's) existence and it will turn its mindless drones on you, on Twitter and eventually in the physical world.
I first came in contact with the Maw during the Dan Rather document scandal. The internet was much newer then so when the document that was supposed to prove GWB was a deserter was proven to be false within hours of its release I thought how exciting this was. The internet would bring us more transparency than ever before. Ha! This was my introduction to the Maw. My understanding of human nature and how society works had to be adjusted. And still to this day I think that "False but Accurate" event was still the most clearly obnoxious one of all, but maybe because it was my first :)
Regarding the Twitter files, there's been a lot of both 'it's not a big deal' and 'I'm not interested' from media types the last few days.
Let me just push back on why it's a big deal and people should be interested:
Beyond the political favoritism, Twitter appears to have had its thumb very heavily on debates related to COVID risk and policy. This contributed to preferred institutional health policy narratives becoming orthodoxy with scant debate. Schools were closed longer than they should have been, we ran around after college students giving them boosters when we should have focused on nursing home residents, and there was significant economic harm caused by prolonged lockdowns that had minimal benefit. Appropriate academics like Bhattacharya were shadow banned and charlatans like the nutritionist Feigl Ding were boosted. This was extremely toxic and I have no question, having watched in real time, that Twitter was consequential in elite opinion making.
The midwit censors who were making the decisions on what was right and what was wrong, who was *reliable* and who was *spreading misinformation* were terrible for the sense making required for the best policy to be devised and implemented.
So... fuck these people, both the censors at Twitter and the journos engaged in hand waving and obfuscation. Their behavior had true costs and things need to be better in the future.
I don’t use Twitter and I think it’s a journalistic cesspool (though I hear certain corners of Twitter are nice; those having to do with birdwatching, for instance). I also don’t care about it as a platform and would be fine if it disappears tomorrow.
However, it’s a platform where journalists create their culture and presidents communicate with the masses. As such what they choose to censor matters a great deal. Yeah it’s a private company and private companies get to content moderate. But that’s the bigger discussion isn’t it? At what point does a private company become so influential that we need to create new rules?
Finally, let’s not forget that Elon Musk *tried to back out of buying it.* But the founders (or whoever ran it I don’t even know) forced it. It’s all about the fucking money.
"Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw."
Pretty much. Anyone who uses the terms "woke" or "cancel culture" or makes fun of sanctimonious pronoun usage gets immediately put into the Right-wing bucket, even if that person supports things like Medicare for All, gun control, and abortion rights.
This is why I love Substack and I love your newsletter. I'm a long time left-of-center guy who feels about as alienated from contemporary liberalism and its snarling hall monitors as he can possibly be. Thank you again for doing what you do.
These are my proposed Terms of Service for social media:
1. You do not have a right to offend.
2. You do not have a right to not be offended.
3. We will ban people (either permanently or temporarily) and remove postings because we can. We own the platform and we get to decide.
The process for issuing bans and removing a post is necessarily opaque and arbitrary. Some of the things that might lead us to ban you or remove one of your posts:
a. If you break the law, and we know it, you'll be banned.
Before anyone complains that someone else has broken the law, make sure you educate yourself before you report it. Remember, we are a big corporation with lots and lots of lawyers. These guys know the law, you probably don't.
b. Our advertisers don't like it.
Even though we own the site, they pay the bills. Usually, we have to make these decisions to keep the money rolling in.
c. The news coverage makes us look bad.
This typically results in 3.b., so there you go.
d. We have noticed it, and we don't like it.
This decision to remove a post or ban is oftentimes purely a personal, made by an individual that may or may not be the best person to make that decision. Too bad. Appeal if you think it's that important that your (probably) banal comment really needs to be put back up so that you get another 100 likes and 40 reposts.
It is very likely that we will be inconsistent in applying the rules above (except for 3.a.).
If a 'bad' post gets noticed by hundreds of thousands and is picked up by the media, we'll probably remove the post and may very likely issue a ban, at least temporarily. Removing posts and banning users typically generates a lot of outrage and traffic to our site, which is good for us.
If a post has 10 likes and one repost, you'll be fine. No one is going to care.
Sometimes we may just appear to be inconsistent, and we will be able to explain why we actually weren't.
Other times we will actually be inconsistent, but we don't need to explain that or justify it. We own the platform, we get to decide.
Finally, millions of you chuckleheads are using a free tool that allows you to share your most idiotic thoughts with millions of other chuckleheads. Don't be surprised that in the billions of words that cross this platform every day you find some that are offensive. For some people, that's the whole point. If you don't want to be offended, go away, we really don't care.
However, if you want to be offended just so you can share your outrage at someone else's post by reposting it here, thank you. This drives traffic, which drives advertising revenues, which makes us more money.
For me, the biggest issue with the Twitter Files is transparency.
The fact that Taibbi has admitted that there were stipulations placed upon him in reporting this but won't tell us what those stipulations were is important. It feels very much like Weiss, Taibbi, and Musk have a specific narrative about the evidence to emerge and they're not willing to release everything in order to allow other people to independently come to the same conclusion.
If Musk and Taibbi want this to be the bombshell they claim it is, they need to release this trove in the same way the Podesta Emails were leaked.
Give us a searchable archive. Without that, we need to just trust Taibbi and Weiss' scattered screenshots of contextless communications.
I have no problem believing the Twitter Files may be a Big Deal, but we need transparency about what's actually in them. Taibbi and Weiss aren't necessarily the wrong people to present this except for the fact that they're not staffed up to deal with the bulk of information here. So they should either work with a staffed newsroom (ha!) or they should release a searchable archive.
I remember the legacy media running wild, lost their minds delivering daily missives of a loopy conspiracy theory too far-fetched for the John Birch Society, ca. 1961, telling themselves every day that "It's Mueller Time".
You say, "They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility."
There's a market, particularly post 2020, for people of left of center who seem capable of providing reporting (or really analysis) that isn't outcome driven. Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro very much fall into this category as well (although both are much more "center-left than you).
I feel like if I read you, or Yglesias or Barro, you are looking at the information available to you, and trying to form an opinion. Frankly, you are much further left than I am, so I often disagree with your conclusions, but at least it seems like you got there honestly. If you, for example, came across some good evidence that charter schools are better than public schools, I feel like you would try to grapple with that and incorporate it into your world view, and would not try to hide it.
OTOH, I have no faith that someone like Michael Hobbs would do the same. He very much seems to start with a thesis and then gather information solely for the purposes of supporting that thesis. Good facts are cherrypicked and highlighted, bad facts are spun or rejected out of hand.
This distinction clearly shows up on the Right too. I disagree with David French on a lot of things, but I think he provides a valuable perspective, because I think he is willing to grapple with, and discuss facts that are not necessarily in line with his world view. OTOH, listening to Sean Hannity is a complete waste of time, since he is just going to be spouting whatever noises support "his side" that day.
Wow... You "don't give a shit about the Twitter files." And you're also a writer concerned with media, technology, and politics (et al.)? I'm not sure I can square this circle unless you haven't actually read what is in them. For instance, the revelation of how political influence and expression repression was wielded by the Dems is, if nothing else, rather instructive going forward (e.g. see point 8 of Taibbi's first batch). It's like complex adaptive network theory come to life in politics in real time. If nothing else the files offer a fine grain close-up of just how porous and tendril-ridden the walls are between politics, media, and social media. And that can't be disregarded even if we hate the platform or avoid it altogether (I'm not on it myself). I understand that you had a hellacious experience on Twitter, and frankly I wonder if that may be clouding your assessment on this. I'd urge a re-consideration, possibly in a follow-up post as it seems emotion, or lack of careful/actual reading of the files in question, is getting the better of you here. Maybe I'm off. In any event, one last thing: the not giving a shit about the Twitter files is, interestingly enough, also what every blue check at the prestige media industrial complex is also saying. In other words, there are different varieties of not giving a shit about the files; not all are the same. In the case of prestige media journos, it's mostly an ass-covering con job; a see-no-evil obfuscation. In your case I know it's different. But the differences don't delineate themselves.
The perception of fairness matters. When people lose faith in the institutions the result is a climate of "Every man for himself". Twitter is relevant here because it's symptomatic of a wider problem.
Imagine if the KKK had mobilized to tear down some Martin Luther King statues. The press would have freaked out. But both the media and locals governments largely cheered on leftist rioters who destroyed monuments to historical figures that they viewed as problematic. Bias is tremendously corrosive to the perception that an institution can be trusted to do the right thing. Is it any wonder that Trump's partisans are pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud? Is that really any crazier than the cops standing by and doing nothing while protesters pull down statues and riot?
The ultimate idiocy is that the left believed that they could burn down the norms that make this country governable just to get rid of Trump and that everything would quickly revert to the status quo once he was gone. The problem is that it is much easier to destroy than create or repair, the actions taken to attack Trump have turned out to be tremendously destructive and the country appears to be entering an era of disunity--a "Great Unraveling" as others have put it. Again, Twitter is a great example. What's the whole purpose of social media? Isn't it to let people talk to each other? But Twitter broke itself in that sense because it became an echo chamber abandoned by the right. Why would you even bother if the people running the platform can be relied on to censor your point of view?
This bothers and worries the shit out of me. In your experience - or anyone else here who moves in these circles - what do journalists, in private, think about this? Is there any chance of a change in approach, where me might actually get real reporting again?
Plus is it really necessary to point out that the real journalism is completely incompatible with narrative? Every ordinary American who hears about Kanye West and Nick Fuentes these days is asking themselves one obvious question: what's a white supremacist doing hanging out with a black guy? Nobody that works in media hasn't looked at this and thought to themselves "Huh?"
The Twitter Files are important for everyone to understand and be upset about, not because Twitter (and Google and Facebook) are politically biased, but because they are biased toward "the Machine," the elite establishment and entrenched bureaucracy that run this country (if not the globe) for their own benefit and always have, to be honest, but are less and less doing people the favor of trying to maintain the illusion that that is not in fact true. In other words, if you want to produce change in this country or leave any semblance of power in the hands of the people, rather than turning them into a serf class, you will understand how all these big tech companies along with your "Maw" attempt to force people to live in a pseudo reality of their own creation, one where everything people physically experience doesn't matter. We're supposed to accept what the "experts" and talking heads tell us is truth rather than our own eyes. That is the lesson of the Twitter files.
And being "right-coded" these days simply means you refuse to buy into that reality or accept that they *should* have the power to create that reality. It has absolutely nothing to do with your principles or politics. And that, my friend, is frightening because in that pseudo-reality, anyone "right-coded" is considered a danger to the "people's," the "democracy's," the "country's" (read: the Machine's) existence and it will turn its mindless drones on you, on Twitter and eventually in the physical world.
That's why you should care.
I first came in contact with the Maw during the Dan Rather document scandal. The internet was much newer then so when the document that was supposed to prove GWB was a deserter was proven to be false within hours of its release I thought how exciting this was. The internet would bring us more transparency than ever before. Ha! This was my introduction to the Maw. My understanding of human nature and how society works had to be adjusted. And still to this day I think that "False but Accurate" event was still the most clearly obnoxious one of all, but maybe because it was my first :)
Regarding the Twitter files, there's been a lot of both 'it's not a big deal' and 'I'm not interested' from media types the last few days.
Let me just push back on why it's a big deal and people should be interested:
Beyond the political favoritism, Twitter appears to have had its thumb very heavily on debates related to COVID risk and policy. This contributed to preferred institutional health policy narratives becoming orthodoxy with scant debate. Schools were closed longer than they should have been, we ran around after college students giving them boosters when we should have focused on nursing home residents, and there was significant economic harm caused by prolonged lockdowns that had minimal benefit. Appropriate academics like Bhattacharya were shadow banned and charlatans like the nutritionist Feigl Ding were boosted. This was extremely toxic and I have no question, having watched in real time, that Twitter was consequential in elite opinion making.
The midwit censors who were making the decisions on what was right and what was wrong, who was *reliable* and who was *spreading misinformation* were terrible for the sense making required for the best policy to be devised and implemented.
So... fuck these people, both the censors at Twitter and the journos engaged in hand waving and obfuscation. Their behavior had true costs and things need to be better in the future.
I don’t use Twitter and I think it’s a journalistic cesspool (though I hear certain corners of Twitter are nice; those having to do with birdwatching, for instance). I also don’t care about it as a platform and would be fine if it disappears tomorrow.
However, it’s a platform where journalists create their culture and presidents communicate with the masses. As such what they choose to censor matters a great deal. Yeah it’s a private company and private companies get to content moderate. But that’s the bigger discussion isn’t it? At what point does a private company become so influential that we need to create new rules?
Finally, let’s not forget that Elon Musk *tried to back out of buying it.* But the founders (or whoever ran it I don’t even know) forced it. It’s all about the fucking money.
"Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw."
Pretty much. Anyone who uses the terms "woke" or "cancel culture" or makes fun of sanctimonious pronoun usage gets immediately put into the Right-wing bucket, even if that person supports things like Medicare for All, gun control, and abortion rights.
This is why I love Substack and I love your newsletter. I'm a long time left-of-center guy who feels about as alienated from contemporary liberalism and its snarling hall monitors as he can possibly be. Thank you again for doing what you do.
How does the Maw differ from the Overton Window?
These are my proposed Terms of Service for social media:
1. You do not have a right to offend.
2. You do not have a right to not be offended.
3. We will ban people (either permanently or temporarily) and remove postings because we can. We own the platform and we get to decide.
The process for issuing bans and removing a post is necessarily opaque and arbitrary. Some of the things that might lead us to ban you or remove one of your posts:
a. If you break the law, and we know it, you'll be banned.
Before anyone complains that someone else has broken the law, make sure you educate yourself before you report it. Remember, we are a big corporation with lots and lots of lawyers. These guys know the law, you probably don't.
b. Our advertisers don't like it.
Even though we own the site, they pay the bills. Usually, we have to make these decisions to keep the money rolling in.
c. The news coverage makes us look bad.
This typically results in 3.b., so there you go.
d. We have noticed it, and we don't like it.
This decision to remove a post or ban is oftentimes purely a personal, made by an individual that may or may not be the best person to make that decision. Too bad. Appeal if you think it's that important that your (probably) banal comment really needs to be put back up so that you get another 100 likes and 40 reposts.
It is very likely that we will be inconsistent in applying the rules above (except for 3.a.).
If a 'bad' post gets noticed by hundreds of thousands and is picked up by the media, we'll probably remove the post and may very likely issue a ban, at least temporarily. Removing posts and banning users typically generates a lot of outrage and traffic to our site, which is good for us.
If a post has 10 likes and one repost, you'll be fine. No one is going to care.
Sometimes we may just appear to be inconsistent, and we will be able to explain why we actually weren't.
Other times we will actually be inconsistent, but we don't need to explain that or justify it. We own the platform, we get to decide.
Finally, millions of you chuckleheads are using a free tool that allows you to share your most idiotic thoughts with millions of other chuckleheads. Don't be surprised that in the billions of words that cross this platform every day you find some that are offensive. For some people, that's the whole point. If you don't want to be offended, go away, we really don't care.
However, if you want to be offended just so you can share your outrage at someone else's post by reposting it here, thank you. This drives traffic, which drives advertising revenues, which makes us more money.
For me, the biggest issue with the Twitter Files is transparency.
The fact that Taibbi has admitted that there were stipulations placed upon him in reporting this but won't tell us what those stipulations were is important. It feels very much like Weiss, Taibbi, and Musk have a specific narrative about the evidence to emerge and they're not willing to release everything in order to allow other people to independently come to the same conclusion.
If Musk and Taibbi want this to be the bombshell they claim it is, they need to release this trove in the same way the Podesta Emails were leaked.
Give us a searchable archive. Without that, we need to just trust Taibbi and Weiss' scattered screenshots of contextless communications.
I have no problem believing the Twitter Files may be a Big Deal, but we need transparency about what's actually in them. Taibbi and Weiss aren't necessarily the wrong people to present this except for the fact that they're not staffed up to deal with the bulk of information here. So they should either work with a staffed newsroom (ha!) or they should release a searchable archive.
Also, of interest to me, I also used the Maw metaphor when talking about the Culture War conversation that forever happens in public: https://radicaledward.substack.com/p/the-gaping-maw-of-the-culture-war
I remember the legacy media running wild, lost their minds delivering daily missives of a loopy conspiracy theory too far-fetched for the John Birch Society, ca. 1961, telling themselves every day that "It's Mueller Time".
You say, "They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility."
There's a market, particularly post 2020, for people of left of center who seem capable of providing reporting (or really analysis) that isn't outcome driven. Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro very much fall into this category as well (although both are much more "center-left than you).
I feel like if I read you, or Yglesias or Barro, you are looking at the information available to you, and trying to form an opinion. Frankly, you are much further left than I am, so I often disagree with your conclusions, but at least it seems like you got there honestly. If you, for example, came across some good evidence that charter schools are better than public schools, I feel like you would try to grapple with that and incorporate it into your world view, and would not try to hide it.
OTOH, I have no faith that someone like Michael Hobbs would do the same. He very much seems to start with a thesis and then gather information solely for the purposes of supporting that thesis. Good facts are cherrypicked and highlighted, bad facts are spun or rejected out of hand.
This distinction clearly shows up on the Right too. I disagree with David French on a lot of things, but I think he provides a valuable perspective, because I think he is willing to grapple with, and discuss facts that are not necessarily in line with his world view. OTOH, listening to Sean Hannity is a complete waste of time, since he is just going to be spouting whatever noises support "his side" that day.
Wow... You "don't give a shit about the Twitter files." And you're also a writer concerned with media, technology, and politics (et al.)? I'm not sure I can square this circle unless you haven't actually read what is in them. For instance, the revelation of how political influence and expression repression was wielded by the Dems is, if nothing else, rather instructive going forward (e.g. see point 8 of Taibbi's first batch). It's like complex adaptive network theory come to life in politics in real time. If nothing else the files offer a fine grain close-up of just how porous and tendril-ridden the walls are between politics, media, and social media. And that can't be disregarded even if we hate the platform or avoid it altogether (I'm not on it myself). I understand that you had a hellacious experience on Twitter, and frankly I wonder if that may be clouding your assessment on this. I'd urge a re-consideration, possibly in a follow-up post as it seems emotion, or lack of careful/actual reading of the files in question, is getting the better of you here. Maybe I'm off. In any event, one last thing: the not giving a shit about the Twitter files is, interestingly enough, also what every blue check at the prestige media industrial complex is also saying. In other words, there are different varieties of not giving a shit about the files; not all are the same. In the case of prestige media journos, it's mostly an ass-covering con job; a see-no-evil obfuscation. In your case I know it's different. But the differences don't delineate themselves.
The perception of fairness matters. When people lose faith in the institutions the result is a climate of "Every man for himself". Twitter is relevant here because it's symptomatic of a wider problem.
Imagine if the KKK had mobilized to tear down some Martin Luther King statues. The press would have freaked out. But both the media and locals governments largely cheered on leftist rioters who destroyed monuments to historical figures that they viewed as problematic. Bias is tremendously corrosive to the perception that an institution can be trusted to do the right thing. Is it any wonder that Trump's partisans are pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud? Is that really any crazier than the cops standing by and doing nothing while protesters pull down statues and riot?
The ultimate idiocy is that the left believed that they could burn down the norms that make this country governable just to get rid of Trump and that everything would quickly revert to the status quo once he was gone. The problem is that it is much easier to destroy than create or repair, the actions taken to attack Trump have turned out to be tremendously destructive and the country appears to be entering an era of disunity--a "Great Unraveling" as others have put it. Again, Twitter is a great example. What's the whole purpose of social media? Isn't it to let people talk to each other? But Twitter broke itself in that sense because it became an echo chamber abandoned by the right. Why would you even bother if the people running the platform can be relied on to censor your point of view?
This bothers and worries the shit out of me. In your experience - or anyone else here who moves in these circles - what do journalists, in private, think about this? Is there any chance of a change in approach, where me might actually get real reporting again?
Also I would note that the pendulum is swinging back. The guy behind the Daily Stormer has had his Twitter account restored after 10 years.
Plus is it really necessary to point out that the real journalism is completely incompatible with narrative? Every ordinary American who hears about Kanye West and Nick Fuentes these days is asking themselves one obvious question: what's a white supremacist doing hanging out with a black guy? Nobody that works in media hasn't looked at this and thought to themselves "Huh?"