The Theater of Twitter File Transparency

Microsoft
By Microsoft 10 Min Read

But Weiss revealed both less and more than he intended, and in the process helped confirm what should have already been obvious after Matt Taibbi’s first round of Twitter Files posts: the trumped-up scandals allegedly revealed by this favorable access to the public relationships to Twitter’s internal systems offer a theatrical transparency that occludes the lack of the real thing under Musk’s leadership.

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Part of the problem lies in the actual definition of “shadowban”. The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean, with all the ideologically useful flexibility of words like “woke up.” This allowed right-wing Musk fans to play gotcha with an old tweet from Twitter HQ that adamantly denied shadowbanning. “But, ha!” they seem to say: “Now the intrepid journalist Bari Weiss has proved that this is not the case!” Weiss took advantage of this deliberate slipperiness when he said, “What many people call ‘shadowbanning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘visibility filtering,’ or VF,” and implied that his sources said they were exactly the same thing.

But all it showed was that Twitter was doing what it always said it would. First, the “visibility filter” covers everything, including user-generated filtering. If you’ve blocked or muted someone, your visibility has been filtered out for you, in business jargon. It also covers how tweets from openly suspended accounts would be made invisible to the public. Without linking to it, Weiss selectively quotes from this Twitter blog post from 2018 by ex-head of trust and safety Vijaya Gadde and ex-head of product Kayvon Beykpour, where they said flatly: “People are asking us if we rule out the ban. We do not.”

The problem for the crowd is that there are more words in this post. Gadde and Beykpour gave a clear definition of shadowbanning: “deliberately making someone’s content invisible to all but the person who posted it, without the knowledge of the original poster.” This, they claimed, has not been done and nothing in Twitter’s files proves otherwise. Musk aficionados have considered this mere weasel pun. But surprisingly, there are even more words in this blog post. That is to say: “We rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models consider many signals to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We also need to reach out to bad faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.”

This ranking is explained in more detail with examples and an FAQ about a recent incident where some Republican politicians (along with Democratic and many other non-conservative politicians) were temporarily unable to be auto-suggested via search. The issue was quickly resolved, but Gadde and Beykpour were clear that Twitter had always been committed to, and always would be committed to, ranking and filtering based on a variety of factors. In other words, the thing Weiss actually “discovered” was something Twitter admitted to over four years ago. He’s also on Twitter Terms of Service.

In short, no one’s tweets were unobtainable to the public without the poster knowing: If they were suspended or banned, of course they would have been notified. De-amplification, which affects a person’s ranking in search results and the like, is quite different. Someone could call him “freedom of speech but not freedom of contact”.

The people who play the semantic games are Musk and his propagandists, performing a pantomime of transparency glossing over a series of issues. Matt Taibbi revealed that the Trump administration has been making inquiries to Twitter all the time, but we know nothing about what they were, what they did, and why. Weiss revealed that the transphobic TikTok Libs account he was actually receiving preferential treatment: no moderation decisions could be made on the account without consulting superiors, a privilege afforded to very few on the platform and no doubt implemented to avoid upsetting the ever-fickle online law. How come?

But above all, there has been absolutely no transparency in this regard Of Moss decision-making process since his arrival. Where am I his e-mail? When can we get insight into how he has already made numerous content moderation decisions on his own? When will it be allowed to verify that his public statements match his private reasoning? When will we learn how critical personnel decisions were made? The answer is: probably never, in the absence of actual legal action.

Musk’s Potemkin transparency is only meant to flatter him by concocting fake scandals about Twitter’s former leadership (which, it should be noted, he made quite rich with his purchase). It paints a fictional picture of Twitter as a dictatorship that Musk unleashed to the adulation of the cheering masses. That, aside from its general utility for the bottomless politics of resentment and self-victimization of the right, is the primary focus of this whole enterprise. For the populist right, it offers the paradox of a Zeno conspiracy, where the final revelation is just another viral Twitter thread.

It’s difficult take people seriously when they complain that twitter has been led by a group of titled individuals with managerial responsibilities who make management decisions while simultaneously encouraging the consolidation of those tasks into the hands of a man. What Musk offers isn’t transparency: it’s caprice. His idiosyncratic whims, for which we can only take his word for it without any appeal mechanism or accountability, I am the content moderation policy. It’s amazing to believe that anyone can see this as an improvement.

This mirrors the larger takeover fiction promulgated by Musk fans: that it has somehow emancipated the company and made it more democratic and accountable. But in terms of corporate governance, he has simply moved from the oligarchic democracy of a publicly traded company – which, not for nothing, was required by law to disclose much to the public – to a personalist dictatorship.

What he dreams of is freedom from all responsibility. It’s not freeing “the people,” it’s freeing itself: Making Twitter private meant making sure it wouldn’t be liable to shareholders or a board of directors, and could only reveal what it wanted to. In a typically brazen move, after granting ideologically captivated stenographers unlimited access to Twitter’s tools to promote a message he approved of, he sent a emails threatening his staff with legal action if they ever leaked anything. Transparency indeed. Musk dreams of a world where no one says “no” to him. It’s a solipsistic dream shared by too many fans of him.

The kind of people who worship Musk’s feet online, especially his new group of right-wing manifestos, are the type whose every accusation is a confession or an aspiration. Rest assured that everything they have falsely accused Twitter of doing is what they are trying to do to their many ideological enemies. Indeed, it’s already happening, with no transparency on reasoning, no clear TOS violations to cite, and no appeals process. His every move is a mockery of the idea of ​​transparency. The public is afraid that Musk is gutting the content moderation staff and CSAM teams in particular will it lead to a wave of such vile material? Falsely insinuating your former colleagues that you are covering up for pedophiles. Right-wing populists steeped in QAnon conspiracies will cheer you up, you’ll look revolutionary, and meanwhile things will get steadily worse.

The only potentially positive thing to emerge from this mess is Musk’s efforts to make Twitter’s VF more visible to end users, telling them if they’re being downgraded and why. I’d really appreciate that, but it’s just another promise from Musk; as with everything else, look at what Musk does rather than what he tweets. And what he’s doing points in a disturbing direction.

Musk’s most enthusiastic supporters lived in a delusional dystopia of their own making. Now they want to take revenge for the imagined deception. It won’t be nice.

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