Twitter Files and the value of free speech

Over the last week, the world has learned much about the inner workings of social media giant Twitter prior to its purchase by Elon Musk.

Musk has provided access to internal Twitter documents to independent journalists

Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, and Michael Shellenberger, most recently a candidate for governor of California.

Their findings have been released in periodic installments on Twitter, five parts in total as of this writing.

The first installment, released by Taibbi, confirmed that, indeed, Twitter suppressed the New York Post’s accurate story about Hunter Biden’s computer soon before the November 2020 election on erroneous grounds.

The second installment confirmed what many previously figured was happening despite repeated public denials by Twitter, namely, that Twitter did in fact suppress accounts in a targeted fashion. Among those targeted was Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and medicine at Stanford University, who rose to prominence with his salient critiques of COVID policies. Commentaries by Bhattacharya critiquing mandatory masking of children in 2021 and making the case for a more restrained and deliberate approach to COVID in 2022 were proudly published in these pages.

The third, fourth and fifth installments, released by

Taibbi and Shellenberger, cover meetings between Twitter and the FBI and the sloppily strung together justifications for banning president of the United States Donald Trump from the platform.

Some Twitter employees pushed back at the obviously outcome-driven focus of most Twitter employees who just wanted Trump gone.

The Jan. 8, 2020, tweet used to justify Trump’s ban is: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” one unnamed Twitter employee said in internal messages.

”I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” said Twitter official Anika Navaroli.

“Maybe because I am from China,” wrote on Twitter employee pushing back against the rush to ban Trump. “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”

And yet, Twitter went ahead and banned him anyway.

Meanwhile, Iran’s tyrannical Ayatollah Khamenei has a Twitter account, as does Venezuela’s communist leader Nicolás Maduro. Murderous thugs, it turn out, were tolerable to the highly educated and highly compensated Twitter employees. But not a sitting president of the United States.

Now, of course, Twitter is and was a private company. If Twitter wanted to be a social media tool for the left and suppress or ban people or groups they didn’t want to platform, that’s their right. But that’s not how they postured themselves to be, and so many on the right are justifiably crowing at these revelations.

Maintaining a commitment to free speech and resisting the temptation to suppress contrary points of view is especially hard without an appreciation for why freedom of speech is important. Evidently, many Twitter officials and employees allowed their feelings to trump any commitment to free speech they have had.