Discussion: Twitter files reveal the greatest first amendment scandal in history

Elon Musk acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022 and subsequently released a set of internal Twitter documents, known as the Twitter Files, through journalists Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang and Bari Weiss, and author Michael Shellenberger in December 2022. These files document the process of content moderation. At issue are the decisions that moderators made in the runup to the 2020 presidential elections between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, particularly with respect to files on the Hunter Biden laptop which were passed to the New York Post. At the time, this story was dismissed by the mainstream media and censored by Twitter and other social media companies.

Was the Hunter Biden laptop a legitimate story in 2020? Did the FBI, CIA, and other federal departments violate the First Amendment by coercing social media to suppress the story? Should the government be involved in the moderation of social media?

Pro
It was bad enough that Twitter chose to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2022. But now the Twitter Files demonstrate that this was not simply political bias at Twitter and other social media companies, it was driven by the FBI, CIA, and other state actors who had been working against President Trump since before his election in 2016. The FBI knew that the Hunter Biden laptop was genuine and that it had been turned over to the New York Post and it then fed warnings to Twitter and other social media companies about Russia meddling in the election all the while that politicians were threatening social media companies for allowing free speech on their platform. The election is over but the guilty individuals and institutions continue uncorrected and unpunished.

Con
The so-called “Twitter Files” are little more than a publicity stunt. The actual documents released are underwhelming, nothing like they are being presented by right-wing media, and are just the latest installment of election denial. The bigger problem is that Musk is using them as an excuse to dismantle the protections that the previous managers had built at Twitter. As a result, social media is becoming a communication hub for conspiracy theories and political violence.

https://www.rhetocracy.org/issue/view?issueEntityId=354987857658