Elon Musk’s Twitter Files Are Bait

Last night, Elon Musk celebrated the release of a new entry in the “Twitter Files” series, which aims to … Well, that’s complicated. It’s a supposed transparency project from Musk that, to date, has included giving two independent writers access to internal Twitter communications, as well as to the company’s Slack channels. So far, they’ve produced two threads, each totaling about 30 tweets, purporting to show how Twitter’s executives have schemed and colluded to censor political speech for partisan gain. The tweets are breathless, alluding at various points to “chilling passages” and “secret groups” of executive decision makers.

This latest tranche, released with commentary by Bari Weiss, gave me a look at something I’ve always wanted to see: a portion, at least, of the social platform’s internal moderation systems. The screenshots show how users can be flagged in various ways by the site’s employees: We can see that some users are marked as high profile, for example, and that individuals have a strike count, which seems to reference how many times the account has been caught in an infraction of Twitter’s rules. Then there are the juicier labels, like do not amplify and the ominous-sounding trends blacklist.