The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity
No one really knows what Elon Musk’s company is doing to free speech. (From The Atlantic)
In the classic Japanese film Rashomon, four people retell the same incident in different and sometimes contradictory ways. The debate about the Twitter Files—documents from and Slack conversations within the social-media platform now owned by Elon Musk—reminds me of that movie. This month, the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and the author Michael Shellenberger have posted tweet threads describing the internal debates over banning the sharing of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, throttling the circulation of certain posts and accounts, and taking down then-President Donald Trump’s account after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Depending on your perspective, you might conclude that suspending Trump was an essential safety measure, a big scandal, or utterly inconsequential.
