Opinion | Why the ‘Twitter Files’ Are Falling Flat

The public has recently gotten an inside peek at the workings of Twitter and Facebook, thanks to a pair of extraordinary document drops.

The first release — the “Facebook Files” — came in late 2021 from Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The second — the “Twitter Files” — came this month from Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner. Unfortunately for Musk, the “Twitter Files” are not having nearly the same impact as the “Facebook Files” did. And for good reason.

The two document drops are set apart by the methods of the media rollouts and the goals of the informants. The “Facebook Files” were the product of an intensive Wall Street Journal investigation, with Haugen later releasing the data to over a dozen major media outlets, who confirmed and amplified the original claims. Over at Twitter, Musk has given privileged access to some ideologically friendly journalists who must publish their findings on his platform.

Haugen’s ultimate goal was to blow the whistle on Facebook’s inability to reckon with the damage caused by its own product, and she largely succeeded. The “Facebook Files” helped drive a new narrative about how the social media company handled (or failed to handle) content moderation issues and fueled incitement across the globe.

On the other hand, the “Twitter Files” are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies. Tweets laced with allegations that former Twitter executives purposefully stopped aggressive moderation of child exploitation often subsume the Twitter replies, but the details of the “Twitter Files” do not seem to hold new revelations. Instead, they serve the purpose of demonizing Twitter’s former content moderation executives to make it seem like they were prioritizing the moderation of political disinformation above child exploitation. In the crosshairs, quite literally, are a handful of former employees tasked with “Trust and Safety,” tech speak for brand management. One of them, Yoel Roth, has fled his home amid death threats.

In fact, what the “Twitter Files” reveal is what we already knew about social media governance from the “Facebook Files”: Social media corporations spend a large amount of time and resources discussing how to bend the rules so that politicians and celebrity influencers don’t get suspended. To pretend that the “Twitter Files” illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated.

Ultimately, both social media releases are attempts at shaping the mainstream media narratives about the purpose and practice of content moderation on massively large open platforms. But while the “Facebook Files” took months to contextualize and fact-check, Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. So far, the media largely isn’t taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn’t just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. Silence is still the editor’s best kept weapon in the content wars.

While the “Twitter Files” are numbered to imply some continuity, the content is mostly searches of particular former executives’ emails and chats, focusing on very inside baseball discussions about meeting with the government regarding threats to the platform. Intent on drumming up suspicion and intrigue, the tweet-thread shenanigans of the media gatekeepers, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, have made it increasingly more difficult for mainstream outlets to cover this “nothingburger,” as Musk might say. Love it or hate it, coverage by legitimate newsrooms still matters because of the high burden of editorial and legal review that hold up major investigations until all is fact-checked. There is no such apparatus functioning to substantiate the claims made in “Twitter Files” threads. The cherry-picked so-called evidence consists of screenshots from former Twitter executives, but if you bother to read such tiny print, the evidence implies the executives were desperately attempting to rationalize how to apply their own terms of service against an increasingly hostile President Donald Trump who was using social media to claim he won an election he lost.

Perhaps Musk can take heart in the fact that Haugen also struggled to control the news: At one point, the Facebook document release suffered from a botched embargo that perhaps lessened the overall impact on public opinion. After the Wall Street Journal published its multi-part series called the “Facebook Files,” there was a secondary rollout known as the “Facebook Papers” produced by major media outlets as diverse as CNN, Le Monde, NBC News, Fox Business and POLITICO who were served drips of data daily. This frustrated reporters who had a difficult time piecing together stories because they did not know what else might be coming. These selected news organizations were supposed to cooperate on the enormous trove, but after the New York Times fired off a big story featuring the leaks from Facebook on a Friday evening, the other outlets that had been waiting for the Monday morning embargo published in quick succession. This created a feverish cascade of stories about Facebook’s negligence but may have confused the public, who was largely over it by the next week. To this end, I have been working alongside Latanya Sweeney at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on FBArchive, a project to catalog these materials and publish them in the public interest.

As an internet researcher, it is my job to monitor, measure and analyze trends in technology. I listened to several Twitter Spaces involving Musk and he is reveling in the attention from conservative media, even as he is chagrined at the lack of mainstream media uptake.

If the “Facebook Files” were about the public interest, the “Twitter Files” are all about public relations. Like the brand management of Tesla, Musk is building a sycophantic legion of true believers bent on believing the platform can influence elections and change the culture (which all could very well be true in a limited way). As we watch leading journalists and researchers, like Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker and Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, leave the platform, I can’t help but think that everyday Musk is in charge, Twitter is being drained of the very thing that made it influential and informative in the first place. That exodus may be the one thing the “Twitter Files” are accomplishing.