Brief summary of the “Twitter Papers” tempest in a teapot.

 

IMPORTANT, BAD, ALREADY KNOWN:

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Twitter’s then management screwed up badly and rightly came under heavy criticism for throttling users’ sharing (even in DMs) of New York Post coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. The initial excuse (a bad excuse even at the time) was that it was hard to rule out the possibility that some malign actor had hacked the laptop contents and inserted bogus added material alongside the genuine. CBS’s recent forensic examination of the laptop found no evidence of tampering.

The head of Twitter apologized for the company’s conduct a year ago, and virtually no one still defends it. All this was already well established.

ALREADY WELL KNOWN IN SOCIAL MEDIA FIELD, IMPLICATIONS ARE WORTH DISCUSSION:

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All the big social media platforms enable mass/multiple reporting of posts, i.e. pull requests, and most or all maintain a VIP lane for celebrities and political campaigns to do so with expedited attention (though not necessarily favorable action). Both the then Trump administration and the then Biden campaign took advantage of these VIP lanes.

NEW AND NOT SCANDALOUS:

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Twitter’s internal communications, now public, provide no evidence that the decision to throttle the Post laptop story or other news coverage resulted from any communication from a federal agency, such as the FBI. That’s good.

The Biden campaign made takedown requests regarding tweets with pictures of Hunter Biden depicting nudity and drug use. The far more damaging decision to throttle straight news, on the other hand, appears to have been advanced by Twitter’s own management, and was seriously controversial within management ranks. Almost incredibly, founder Jack Dorsey, who tended to advocate for “more speech” policies, appears to have kept out of the loop.

In short: no state action and hence no First Amendment violation. No sign that Biden campaign (or for that matter Trump administration) pulled strings. One person who comes off well is Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who warned management that they were making a huge mistake to throttle the news. Reputational black eye for Twitter remains intact. The key people involved have left.

And there is no good case either before or after that the company’s bad decision altered the outcome of the election, which has not kept certain familiar blowhards from shooting off their mouths otherwise.