This is a thoughtful take that makes some insightful points. I like the degree of nuance.
Some points on the idea that Musk turned to “extremely divisive” journalists and thus undermined his ostensible goal:
-In a situation where someone has information they believe can move the Overton window of national conversation, this can be precisely what you want. Snowden doing this with surveillance through Glenn Greenwald, because he believed Greenwald would actually publish his revelations, is just one example; Taibbi’s sources on finance turned to him to get around captured beat reporters, people came to Gawker all the time with real stories as you know for similar reasons. Obviously whether Musk actually had that information is a matter of controversy, but I think it’s also obvious he believes he does and that his goals may comport with the preceding.
-The term “divisive” is often used as an indirect insult against journalists who people merely disagree with. I’m not saying you’re doing that here, and presumably you’d say this relates to your bigger point about credibility, but to the extent it scans as a general comment on quality it seems like a non sequitur: Any journalist sufficiently ahead of the curve on a given topic is going to say things many people disagree with, even if they are ultimately “proven right.” Yes, sometimes they can write one story that goes against the conventional wisdom but is so deep and persuasive it wins most people over and the journalist is never in a state of being “divisive.” But most often people (especially *cough* in whatever longstanding powerful industry they critique) will loudly criticize them for a while. One way to avoid this is never to provide people with information that is particularly novel or analysis that is particularly controversial or critical. But it stands to reason that some of the “best” journalists will be “divisive,” where “best” roughly speaking includes criticizing powerful institutions using information and insights most journalists don’t yet have and eventually producing a change in how society perceives those institutions and what specifically it expects from them.
-Lastly, I’d argue that however they are perceived in a particular corner of Twitter and (sorry yes I’m going to say this cliched thing) professional class of broadly Brooklyn adjacent coastal media professionals, Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are not widely perceived as particularly divisive journalists. obviously that’s a subjective call! Still, I think a similar critique could be made of the idea that Musk’s goals are particularly political.
To be clear I chose "divisive" because it seemed like the best adjective available to suggest that Taibbi and Weiss are probably not ideal choices if the goal is actually to increase or regain broad credibility, because the fact of their "divisiveness" will always erode credibility among some people as much as it shores it up among others. ("Divisive" seemed, at least, less charged than "partisan" or "ideological" or "agenda-driven.")
My point is less that Elon Musk is doing a "bad job" at getting people to trust Twitter because he's choosing these "divisive [implied: bad] reporters" than to suggest that his choice of reporters suggests he has other goals in mind -- for example, as you say, "divisive" reporters are good choices if the goal is "to move the Overton window," which seems like a different function than a kind of journalistic truth-and-reconciliation committee. Of course, it's possible that (say) the Times would have refused to publish or receive the leaked documents -- in fact, if Musk insisted on "publish on Twitter first" conditions, they definitely would've -- but given how little transparency there's been about this project so far I'm not inclined to be generous in my guesses of what Musk is up to.
who would have been a better journalist/publication for Elon to go to here? his core point seems to be that there is no longer broad credibility in media. many journalists would look at the interface, see these blacklisted accounts and wouldn't see a problem.
"Better" in the sense of "would have published something actually clarifying instead of elliptical"? Or "better" in the sense of "would have cultivated broad cross-partisan trust in Twitter"? I only care about the question of "which journalist did he leak to" as a way of assessing his own claims about why he's doing this. In which case, I mean: He owns a big website that a lot of people visit, why not just transparently publish them there, all at once, without mediating them through a journalist at all?
But I'll admit that also feel a little insane even being obligated to assess at face value his claim that he's trying to regain Twitter's credibility -- I basically reject the premise that "rebuilding trust in Twitter" is a necessary step in any Twitter business or political project. As you said in another comment, this is much more obviously a case of, like, the revolutionaries seizing the U.S. embassy and carting out filing cabinets filled with documents. They don't do that to "rebuild trust in the U.S."
Ultimately the problem with doing counterfactuals here about "what other journalist could have done this?" is that we still don't know what the "factual" is. We still (at least, last time I checked) have no real visibility into the process of "The Twitter Files" -- what access these journalists are being given, who is supervising it, what the terms and conditions were, what documents or files are being left out. We don't actually know, for example, what Taibbi, Weiss, or other journalists are being shown or told before agreeing (or declining) to look at or publish "the Twitter files." And frankly I feel like I barely understand what they're actually publishing -- what those tags actually mean in practice, what the extent of this kind of information-limiting is, the processes through which they're assigned, etc. So the idea that "many journalists would look at the interface, see these blacklisted accounts and wouldn't see a problem" -- what interface are they seeing? Which accounts? What are they being told by their sources, and how are they checking that information?
Put it this way: If a source emailed me and said "I have proof that Dan Bongino's account is being suppressed by Twitter" -- I mean, I would've emailed them back, but it's genuinely hard to assess the extent to which the bare fact that Dan Bongino doesn't show up in (certain?) Twitter searches (if that's what we're talking about? Again, unclear precisely what any of those tags mean in terms of how Twitter actually functions) counts as "news," given that Twitter has quite openly talked about limiting the reach of (what it defines as) "misinformation," especially in the context of COVID.
But if a source came to me and said "I have broad back-end access to Twitter moderator tools and I can look up anyone you want [in a way that is legal]" I would've said "hell yeah." And I suspect that the vast majority of journalists on this beat would have said the same thing.
yeah. I can see why he went with Bari and Taibbi here—Ryan's example above with Snowden and Greenwald/Poitras overlaps—but it does feel like a miss to not be transparent about how the access is working or open up this access somehow to the general public or other outlets. If his goal really is trust, there are * so many * other things he could have done here but it takes a discipline and diplomacy he doesn't seem to currently have the patience for.
I am though, still holding breath until Bari and Taibbi release their longer form pieces. The requirement that they need to publish these first on twitter created even more chaos and could listen their impact.
As always I appreciate the 360° Read Max experience.
The conditions of access transparency issue is interesting. If the conditions go beyond “publish on Twitter first” (which at this point was obviously a condition) I’d be interested to know. On the other hand we know more about the sourcing and related motives and expectations on this story, I’d argue, than most stories we read. It’s incredibly common that an executive will leak something to, paraphrasing NYT today, discredit a predecessor. That is in the open here and, through an apparent unplanned problem, we even know the identity of one of the corporate conduits.
A difference is that many news institutions have ethics policies that reporters follow (NYT et al) or at least an institutional ethos (Gawker again). I think Glenn is distinctive enough he arguably has an ethos too, but maybe substack iterations of Bari and Matt leave people confused about what deals they might strike (to the extent that confusion is more than a rhetorical feint by some critics, Read Max obviously excluded).
This leads into questions about the source’s (Musk’s) goal. You say tomayto I say tomahto—when I say move the Overton window I am thinking “convince people that Twitter censorship was bad” (or “moderation” if you prefer), which seems pretty close to a truth and reconciliation committee on old Twitter, to me.
I’m maybe assuming more about him going into this than you are. I don’t read as much into his WSJ comment about credibility — I think your second bullet point about speech gets closer to his motive. It may be true this speaks to a limited audience but he seems a lot like a billionaire who impulsively bought Twitter over this very issue so it’s an audience that includes him and reflects him in many ways (even those who disagree, actually). We all know how seductive that can be. It’s why we spent time on Twitter in the first place.
was also fascinated by this release and found the number of people saying this "wasn't a story" to be pretty ridiculous.
IMO, I think this is less about Elon doing this for more clicks and more about settling a score.
This is one thing you can do after a successful coup d'état—share what the other org was obscuring the whole time.
And for people who have been banned or shadow banned from twitter, there's plenty of stuff to look into. I hope Bari's piece takes a deeper dive in article form.
Tangentially related to your point about the lack of clarity around the tags--something sorely missing from every discussion about this bullshit is a real glossary of what people have in mind when they say stuff like "deboosted" and "shadow banned". For the forum heads, those terms used to mean something! Now a bunch of boomers are using them to mean... "crypto bots stopped trying to scam me"? Though I am looking forward to the possibility of Ted Cruz bleating about getting "beecocked".
Not going to search for it, but somebody commented on Twitter that the secondary purpose of all this is to lay the groundwork for everyone's TL to be filled up by Libs of TikTok and Ben Shapiro posts whether you want them or not and that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, shit, I meant to put this in the post — the thing about that happening is like … people will leave? I don’t think it’s “fine” that there will be more LibsofTikTok out there, but I think turning up the racism and transphobia dial will effectively kill the platform. All the nazis and right wing freaks got banned and suppressed because they were limiting Twitter’s growth and profits, not out of the goodness of Twitter’s hearts.
Yeah, one irony (of many) in all this is that a manual moderation platform like the one Weiss photographed with a Nikon Coolpix is there because any politically-agnostic attempt at pure algorithmic moderation will end up (correctly) banning way more prominent conservatives as spam or TOS violations. The whole point of those tags is to prevent another Diamond & Silk hearing, and now they're trying to gin one up over exactly those efforts!
All interesting points. I think this is the start of what will be an ongoing discussion around moderation with AI etc., if twitter can solve this problem better than his competitors than ultimately his platform becomes attractive, so that is the meaning that could go behind the initial salacious clickbait. However all the doxing, and the manner in which this is all being done is so politically motivated that it almost cancels out the negative effect it would have to prior administrators, and it just wouldn't beget any loyalty in me if I saw my boss doing that now. In general, Twitter feels now like you are hanging out an auditorium with the principle. Musk should stop tweeting so much.
This is a thoughtful take that makes some insightful points. I like the degree of nuance.
Some points on the idea that Musk turned to “extremely divisive” journalists and thus undermined his ostensible goal:
-In a situation where someone has information they believe can move the Overton window of national conversation, this can be precisely what you want. Snowden doing this with surveillance through Glenn Greenwald, because he believed Greenwald would actually publish his revelations, is just one example; Taibbi’s sources on finance turned to him to get around captured beat reporters, people came to Gawker all the time with real stories as you know for similar reasons. Obviously whether Musk actually had that information is a matter of controversy, but I think it’s also obvious he believes he does and that his goals may comport with the preceding.
-The term “divisive” is often used as an indirect insult against journalists who people merely disagree with. I’m not saying you’re doing that here, and presumably you’d say this relates to your bigger point about credibility, but to the extent it scans as a general comment on quality it seems like a non sequitur: Any journalist sufficiently ahead of the curve on a given topic is going to say things many people disagree with, even if they are ultimately “proven right.” Yes, sometimes they can write one story that goes against the conventional wisdom but is so deep and persuasive it wins most people over and the journalist is never in a state of being “divisive.” But most often people (especially *cough* in whatever longstanding powerful industry they critique) will loudly criticize them for a while. One way to avoid this is never to provide people with information that is particularly novel or analysis that is particularly controversial or critical. But it stands to reason that some of the “best” journalists will be “divisive,” where “best” roughly speaking includes criticizing powerful institutions using information and insights most journalists don’t yet have and eventually producing a change in how society perceives those institutions and what specifically it expects from them.
-Lastly, I’d argue that however they are perceived in a particular corner of Twitter and (sorry yes I’m going to say this cliched thing) professional class of broadly Brooklyn adjacent coastal media professionals, Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are not widely perceived as particularly divisive journalists. obviously that’s a subjective call! Still, I think a similar critique could be made of the idea that Musk’s goals are particularly political.
To be clear I chose "divisive" because it seemed like the best adjective available to suggest that Taibbi and Weiss are probably not ideal choices if the goal is actually to increase or regain broad credibility, because the fact of their "divisiveness" will always erode credibility among some people as much as it shores it up among others. ("Divisive" seemed, at least, less charged than "partisan" or "ideological" or "agenda-driven.")
My point is less that Elon Musk is doing a "bad job" at getting people to trust Twitter because he's choosing these "divisive [implied: bad] reporters" than to suggest that his choice of reporters suggests he has other goals in mind -- for example, as you say, "divisive" reporters are good choices if the goal is "to move the Overton window," which seems like a different function than a kind of journalistic truth-and-reconciliation committee. Of course, it's possible that (say) the Times would have refused to publish or receive the leaked documents -- in fact, if Musk insisted on "publish on Twitter first" conditions, they definitely would've -- but given how little transparency there's been about this project so far I'm not inclined to be generous in my guesses of what Musk is up to.
who would have been a better journalist/publication for Elon to go to here? his core point seems to be that there is no longer broad credibility in media. many journalists would look at the interface, see these blacklisted accounts and wouldn't see a problem.
"Better" in the sense of "would have published something actually clarifying instead of elliptical"? Or "better" in the sense of "would have cultivated broad cross-partisan trust in Twitter"? I only care about the question of "which journalist did he leak to" as a way of assessing his own claims about why he's doing this. In which case, I mean: He owns a big website that a lot of people visit, why not just transparently publish them there, all at once, without mediating them through a journalist at all?
But I'll admit that also feel a little insane even being obligated to assess at face value his claim that he's trying to regain Twitter's credibility -- I basically reject the premise that "rebuilding trust in Twitter" is a necessary step in any Twitter business or political project. As you said in another comment, this is much more obviously a case of, like, the revolutionaries seizing the U.S. embassy and carting out filing cabinets filled with documents. They don't do that to "rebuild trust in the U.S."
Ultimately the problem with doing counterfactuals here about "what other journalist could have done this?" is that we still don't know what the "factual" is. We still (at least, last time I checked) have no real visibility into the process of "The Twitter Files" -- what access these journalists are being given, who is supervising it, what the terms and conditions were, what documents or files are being left out. We don't actually know, for example, what Taibbi, Weiss, or other journalists are being shown or told before agreeing (or declining) to look at or publish "the Twitter files." And frankly I feel like I barely understand what they're actually publishing -- what those tags actually mean in practice, what the extent of this kind of information-limiting is, the processes through which they're assigned, etc. So the idea that "many journalists would look at the interface, see these blacklisted accounts and wouldn't see a problem" -- what interface are they seeing? Which accounts? What are they being told by their sources, and how are they checking that information?
Put it this way: If a source emailed me and said "I have proof that Dan Bongino's account is being suppressed by Twitter" -- I mean, I would've emailed them back, but it's genuinely hard to assess the extent to which the bare fact that Dan Bongino doesn't show up in (certain?) Twitter searches (if that's what we're talking about? Again, unclear precisely what any of those tags mean in terms of how Twitter actually functions) counts as "news," given that Twitter has quite openly talked about limiting the reach of (what it defines as) "misinformation," especially in the context of COVID.
But if a source came to me and said "I have broad back-end access to Twitter moderator tools and I can look up anyone you want [in a way that is legal]" I would've said "hell yeah." And I suspect that the vast majority of journalists on this beat would have said the same thing.
yeah. I can see why he went with Bari and Taibbi here—Ryan's example above with Snowden and Greenwald/Poitras overlaps—but it does feel like a miss to not be transparent about how the access is working or open up this access somehow to the general public or other outlets. If his goal really is trust, there are * so many * other things he could have done here but it takes a discipline and diplomacy he doesn't seem to currently have the patience for.
I am though, still holding breath until Bari and Taibbi release their longer form pieces. The requirement that they need to publish these first on twitter created even more chaos and could listen their impact.
this post from Freddie is long but gets to the crux of it for me. https://twitter.com/danielmarans/status/1602342696194310150
As always I appreciate the 360° Read Max experience.
The conditions of access transparency issue is interesting. If the conditions go beyond “publish on Twitter first” (which at this point was obviously a condition) I’d be interested to know. On the other hand we know more about the sourcing and related motives and expectations on this story, I’d argue, than most stories we read. It’s incredibly common that an executive will leak something to, paraphrasing NYT today, discredit a predecessor. That is in the open here and, through an apparent unplanned problem, we even know the identity of one of the corporate conduits.
A difference is that many news institutions have ethics policies that reporters follow (NYT et al) or at least an institutional ethos (Gawker again). I think Glenn is distinctive enough he arguably has an ethos too, but maybe substack iterations of Bari and Matt leave people confused about what deals they might strike (to the extent that confusion is more than a rhetorical feint by some critics, Read Max obviously excluded).
This leads into questions about the source’s (Musk’s) goal. You say tomayto I say tomahto—when I say move the Overton window I am thinking “convince people that Twitter censorship was bad” (or “moderation” if you prefer), which seems pretty close to a truth and reconciliation committee on old Twitter, to me.
I’m maybe assuming more about him going into this than you are. I don’t read as much into his WSJ comment about credibility — I think your second bullet point about speech gets closer to his motive. It may be true this speaks to a limited audience but he seems a lot like a billionaire who impulsively bought Twitter over this very issue so it’s an audience that includes him and reflects him in many ways (even those who disagree, actually). We all know how seductive that can be. It’s why we spent time on Twitter in the first place.
was also fascinated by this release and found the number of people saying this "wasn't a story" to be pretty ridiculous.
IMO, I think this is less about Elon doing this for more clicks and more about settling a score.
This is one thing you can do after a successful coup d'état—share what the other org was obscuring the whole time.
And for people who have been banned or shadow banned from twitter, there's plenty of stuff to look into. I hope Bari's piece takes a deeper dive in article form.
Tangentially related to your point about the lack of clarity around the tags--something sorely missing from every discussion about this bullshit is a real glossary of what people have in mind when they say stuff like "deboosted" and "shadow banned". For the forum heads, those terms used to mean something! Now a bunch of boomers are using them to mean... "crypto bots stopped trying to scam me"? Though I am looking forward to the possibility of Ted Cruz bleating about getting "beecocked".
Twitter Files as an important™️ story is super lame(and *very* Elon!). but i really wanna know what's behind the "Guano" tab in the dashboard lol
Not going to search for it, but somebody commented on Twitter that the secondary purpose of all this is to lay the groundwork for everyone's TL to be filled up by Libs of TikTok and Ben Shapiro posts whether you want them or not and that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, shit, I meant to put this in the post — the thing about that happening is like … people will leave? I don’t think it’s “fine” that there will be more LibsofTikTok out there, but I think turning up the racism and transphobia dial will effectively kill the platform. All the nazis and right wing freaks got banned and suppressed because they were limiting Twitter’s growth and profits, not out of the goodness of Twitter’s hearts.
Yeah, one irony (of many) in all this is that a manual moderation platform like the one Weiss photographed with a Nikon Coolpix is there because any politically-agnostic attempt at pure algorithmic moderation will end up (correctly) banning way more prominent conservatives as spam or TOS violations. The whole point of those tags is to prevent another Diamond & Silk hearing, and now they're trying to gin one up over exactly those efforts!
All interesting points. I think this is the start of what will be an ongoing discussion around moderation with AI etc., if twitter can solve this problem better than his competitors than ultimately his platform becomes attractive, so that is the meaning that could go behind the initial salacious clickbait. However all the doxing, and the manner in which this is all being done is so politically motivated that it almost cancels out the negative effect it would have to prior administrators, and it just wouldn't beget any loyalty in me if I saw my boss doing that now. In general, Twitter feels now like you are hanging out an auditorium with the principle. Musk should stop tweeting so much.