The ‘Twitter Files’ are just the beginning of the rot Elon Musk must repair: Straight Up with Tiana Lowe
Tiana Lowe
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For the price of $44 billion, Elon Musk directly unmasked the disaster brewing among Twitter‘s bureaucracy. In exchange for the promise that news about the so-called “Twitter Files” would be published directly on the social media giant, Musk granted unfettered access of Twitter’s internal premises and messages to journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, along with author Michael Shellenberger.
Much like the WikiLeaks dump of 2016, the Twitter Files confirm what conservatives long suspected, rather than break any earth-shattering news. Yes, the site was absolutely inventing rules on the fly to silence the New York Post’s since-vindicated reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. No, Jack Dorsey was not telling the truth when he swore under oath that the site wasn’t shadow-banning conservatives. And, of course, Twitter executives were salivating long before Jan. 6 at the ways they could finally run Donald Trump off the site.
WHAT THE ‘TWITTER FILES’ SAY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
Nothing completely novel, but far from sanguine either. While conservatives may be a tad over-zealous at their vindication, Leftists and their corporate media mouthpieces are even more unhinged in their response: that nothing at Twitter was ever wrong!
Musk, who is liberal in the purest term of the word, simply wants to abide by free speech as a guiding principle and set transparent goalposts when rules must curb some unsavory speech. And yet, for the sin of pointing out that the site has been remiss in handling child pornography, the Washington Post has likened the billionaire to QAnon conspiracy theorists.
Of course, Musk has much more to deal with than woke scolds who are way too mad online. After all, the censorious, bitterly unhappy instinct reflected in the Twitter Files is simply the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps more accurately, a gross symptom of the greater problem: pure dysfunction.
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As whistleblower Peiter Zatko has attested to, the site had harrowing security flaws, and pre-Musk management, beholden to quarterly earnings reports, was hell-bent on the stock price over long-term growth. Musk, a longtime proponent of the efficiency of private firms over publicly-traded companies, had ample reason to want to take the site private.
To get the deeper story on Twitter’s trials and whether Musk can fix the site, tune in to the latest episode of the Washington Examiner’s new series, Straight Up with Tiana Lowe.