Twitter

How dare Twitter suspend the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Conservative journalists were suspended left and right, and had their accounts shuttered for years, publications had news stories blocked, and when it all came out in the #TwitterFiles, the media defended it.

Multiple publications sneered that it wasn’t a big deal anyway and conservatives were crybabies.

But now it’s a crisis.

At dinner time on December 2 , I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter.

Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?

Two hours later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my wife, Free Press writer Nellie Bowles, and our three-month-old baby.

h/t DM

In a recent monologue, conservative television host Tucker Carlson challenged the reason behind former government intelligence officials being employed by Twitter.

Carlson began his discussion by rhetorically asking his audience, “How many spies would you hire” to work at a tech company, referring to employees with experience in high-level government positions.

A former manager at Twitter, convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison on Wednesday, U.S. prosecutors said.

Ahmad Abouammo, who provided a Saudi official with user information in exchange for a $42,000 watch and a pair of $100,000 wire transfers, received 3.5 years in prison despite prosecutors originally pushing for seven years, according to Reuters. Abouammo was found guilty of spying and money laundering on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, and using his position at Twitter to acquire information about Twitter users for the Saudi Royal Family in August.

Twitter on Wednesday suspended more than 25 accounts that track the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals — including one that followed the movements of the social media company’s owner, Elon Musk, who has said he was committed to “free speech.”

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has taken full responsibility for the social media platform’s many failings — admitting he “completely gave up” pushing back against powerful activists in the company.

The site’s former CEO took full “blame” in a blog giving his “take” on the “Twitter Files,” which have exposed a series of extraordinary behind-the-scenes maneuvers buckling to political pressure, starting with censoring The Post’s exclusive exposes on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post’s blockbuster “Hunter Biden laptop” story merely confirms what most knew already — that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.

In a Tweet thread on Dec. 2, journalist Matt Taibbi exposes the smoking gun — the frantic attempts to claim without evidence that any reference to the NY Post’s story had to be banned from the platform because it might have come from “hacked materials.” This, we can see now, was never seriously believed, even inside Twitter, as the email exchanges make clear.

Alex Seitz-Wald and Scott Wong at NBC News reported on Sunday that liberals are now in a world of hurt due to their angst over Elon Musk taking over Twitter. First-world problems!

The vicious and coordinated attacks by mainstream news figures against independent journalist Matt Taibbi in recent days reinforce an essential point about the American news media: they think we are all drooling idiots. Their response to Taibbi’s release of the Twitter Files, which details the company’s calculated suppression of a major news story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, underscores this exceedingly low estimation of its audience.

Has CBC reported on the Twitter files at all?