On Dec. 2, a journalist named Matt Taibbi created a thread, one of now a few, on Twitter, starting with a tweet that read, “1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES.”
He then spent almost two hours revealing that he had acquired “thousands” of internal documents from Twitter claiming that the Democratic party, the Biden Administration, and other White House executives would remove tweets sharing anything regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop that allegedly contains evidence that President Joe Biden had used his vice-president status to engage in acts of corruption regarding a Ukrainian natural-gas company.
This thread is the beginning of an installment of threads on the documents and revealed actions that allegedly happened behind the scenes of Twitter.
It is still a developing story, with Taibbi still tweeting about the documents and what they reveal regarding several topics, including former President Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection and its following investigation, and the Biden Administration’s collaboration with Twitter executives to suppress certain narratives.
It is an incredibly complicated and winding story that is going to be on the forefront of conversation for a while, I think. I’ve even read some commentary about how all this alleged corruption and collusion is going to be lined up with Watergate in terms of its impact.
I am in no way an expert on what is happening right now with Twitter. I am still learning about it all just like everyone else, and, for what it’s worth, these massive claims are something that I am going to always be slightly skeptical about. I think analytical thinking is going to be on our side here, but it’s still an incredibly difficult conversation to unravel.
Now frankly, I wouldn’t go as far as to say this story is as big as Watergate, although I think they share similar traits of “shock factor.” Something like this in this day and age isn’t something we see on paper too often.
Since social media took over our culture as a primary medium of communication, conspiracy theories come out of the woodwork claiming the government is watching our every move. This is an instance of the conspiracies being true to some extent; the government is really watching.
This whole unraveling story of the big bad government and the all-knowing social media platforms feels a little dystopian to me. Sure, it’s kind of scary knowing that there were some tweets and accounts taken down for whatever reason they had, but it’s almost laughable how tangible it is.
At this point, I have no reason to doubt the factuality of the partial documents shared online, but the definition of “journalism” has gotten wavy in recent years. A lot of the commentary happening gets a little too angled, a little too opinionated.
It’s become a natural instinct to question the accuracy of the news, which is really depressing. If the documents revealing federal-government-Twitter-collusion are really real, we have bigger problems here.
The “Twitter Files” are probably going to be the domino sending off two trails – one trail of companies doubling down on keeping their secrets, and one trail of journalists having a new thing to investigate. Either way, I think it’s going to be really interesting seeing which trail gets ahead of the game.
Abby Provencal can be contacted at
aprovencal@kscequinox.com
