We
finally
have
an
interesting
edition
of
the
Twitter
files!
When
the
Twitter
Files
began,
I
actually
expected something interesting
to
come
out
of
them.
All
of
the
big
tech
companies
have
been
unfortunately
unwilling
to
be
as
transparent
as
they
could
be
about
how
their
content
moderation
practices
work.
Much
of
the
transparency
we’ve
received
has
been
either
through
whistleblowers
leaking
information
(which
is often
misinterpreted
by
journalists)
or
through
the
companies
partnering
with
academics,
which
often
leads
to
rather
dry
analysis
of
what’s
happening,
and
which
maybe
a
dozen
people
read.
There
have
been
moments
of
openness,
but
the
messy
stuff
gets
hidden.
So
I
had
hoped
that
when
Elon
took
over
and
announced
his
plans
to
be
transparent
about
what
had
happened
in
the
past,
we
might
actually
learn
some
dirt.
Because
there’s
always some dirt.
The
big
question
was
what
form
that
dirt
might
take,
and
how
much
of
it
was
systemic
rather
than
one-time
errors
and
mistakes.
But,
until
now,
the
Twitter
Files
have
been
worse
than
useless.
They
were
presented
by
journalists
who
had
neither
the
knowledge
nor
the
experience
to
understand
what
they
were
looking
at,
combined
with
an
apparent
desire
to
present
the
narrative
in
a
certain
framing.
Because
of
that,
I’ve
written
multiple
posts walking
through
the
“evidence” presented,
and
showing
how
Musk’s chosen
reporters
didn’t
understand
things and
were misrepresenting
reality.
Given
that
most
journalist
know
to
put
the
important
revelations
up
top,
and
that
each
new
“release”
in
the
Twitter
files
seemed
more
breathless,
but
less
interesting,
than
the
previous
ones,
I
was
basically
expecting
nothing
at
all
of
interest
to
come
from
the
files.
Indeed,
that
was
a
disappointment.
As
Stanford’s
Renee
DiResta
noted,
this
was a
real
missed
opportunity.
If
the
files
had
actually
been
handed
over
to
people
who
understand
this
field,
what
was
important,
and
what
was
banal
everyday
trust
&
safety
work,
the
real
stories
could
have
been
discussed.
The
Files
thus
far
are
a
missed
opportunity.
To
settle
scores
with
Twitter’s
previous
leaders,
the
platform’s
new
owner
is
pointing
to
niche
examples
of
arguable
excesses
and
missteps,
possibly
creating
far
more
distrust
in
the
process.
And
yet
there
is
a
real
need
for
public
understanding
of
how
platform
moderation
works,
and
visibility
into
how
enforcement
matches
up
against
policy.
We
can
move
toward
genuine
transparency—and,
hopefully,
toward
a
future
in
which
people
can
see
the
same
facts
in
similar
ways.
So
when
the
Intercept’s
Lee
Fang
kicked
off
the
8th
installment
of
the
Twitter
files,
I
was
not
expecting
much
at
all.
After
all,
Fang
was
one
of
the
authors
of
the
very
recent garbage
Intercept
story that
totally
misunderstood
the
role
of
CISA
in
the
government
and
(falsely)
argued
that
the
government
demanded
Twitter
censor
the
Hunter
Biden
laptop
story.
The
fact
that
the
evidence
from
the
Twitter
files totally
disproved his
earlier
story
should
at
least
result
in
Fang
questioning
his
understanding
of
these
things.
And
yet…
it
appears
that
he
may
have
(finally)
legitimately
found
a real story
of
malfeasance
in
the
Twitter
files
in
his
most
recent
installment.
Like
all
the
others,
he
initially
posted
his
findings
—
where
he
admits
he
was
granted
access
to
Twitter’s
internal
systems
via
a
Twitter-employed
lawyer
who
would
search
for
and
access
the
documents
he
requested
—
on
Twitter
in
a
messy
and
hard
to
follow
thread.
He
then
posted a
more
complete
story on
The
Intercept.
The
story
is
still
somewhat
messy
and
confused,
and
it’s
not
entirely
clear
Fang
even
fully
realizes
what
he
found,
but
it
does
suggest
serious
malfeasance
on
the
part
of
the
government.
It
actually
combines
a
few
other
stories
we’ve
covered
recently.
First,
towards
the
end
of
the
summer,
Twitter
and
Meta
announced
that
they
had found
and
taken
down
a
disinformation
campaign running
on
their
platforms
—
and
all
signs
suggested
the
campaign
was
being
run
by
the
US
government.
As
was
noted
at
the
time,
the
propaganda
campaign
did
not
appear
to
be
all
that
successful.
Indeed,
it
was
kind
of
pathetic.
From
the
details,
it sounded like
someone
in
the
US
government
had
the
dumb
idea
of
“hey,
let’s
just
create
our
own
propaganda
social
media
accounts
to
counter
foreign
propaganda
accounts,”
rather
than
embracing
“hey,
we’re
the
US
government,
we
can
just
speak
openly
and
transparently.”
The
overall
failure
of
the
campaign
was…
not
surprising.
And
we
were
happy
that
Twitter
and
Meta
killed
the
campaign
(and
now
we’re
hearing
that
the
US
government
is
doing
an
investigation
into
how
this
campaign
came
to
be
in
the
first
place).
The
second
recent
story
we
had
was
about
Meta’s
“Xcheck”
program,
which
was initially
revealed in
the
Facebook
files
as
a
special
kind
of
“whitelist”
for
high
profile
accounts.
Meta
asked
the
Oversight
Board
to
review
the
program,
and
just
a
few
weeks
ago
the
Oversight
Board finally
released
its
analysis and
suggestions
(after
a
year
of
researching
the
program).
It
turns
out
that
it’s
basically
just
like
what
we
said
when
the
program
was
first
revealed:
after
a
few
too
many
“false
positives”
on
high
profile
accounts
became
embarrassing
(for
example,
then
President
Obama’s
Facebook
account
was
taken
down
because
he
recommended
the
book
“Moby
Dick”
and
there
was
an
automated
flag
on
the
word
“dick”),
someone
at
Facebook
instituted
the
Xcheck
program
to
effectively
whitelist
high
profile
individuals
so
that
flags
on
their
account
would
need
to
be
reviewed
by
a
human
before
any
action
was
taken.
As
we
discussed
in
our
podcast
about
Xcheck,
in
many
ways,
Facebook
was
choosing
to
favor
“false
negatives”
for
high
profile
accounts
over
“false
positives.”
The
end
result,
then,
is
that
high
profile
accounts
are
effectively
allowed
to
get
away
with
more,
and
violate
the
rules
with
a
larger
lag
for
consequences,
but
they’re
less
likely
to
be
suspended
accidentally.
Tradeoffs.
The
entire
content
moderation
space
is
full
of
them.
Again
as
we
noted
when
that
story
first
came
out,
basically every social
media
platform
has
some
form
of
this
in
action.
It
almost
becomes
necessary
to
deal
with
the
scale
and
not
accidentally
ban
your
most
high
profile
users.
But,
it
comes
with
some
serious
risks
and
issues,
which
are
also
highlighted
in
the
Oversight
Board’s policy
recommendations regarding
Xcheck.
Thus,
it’s
not
at
all
surprising
that
Twitter
clearly
has
a
similar
whitelist
feature.
This
was
actually
somewhat
revealed
in
an
earlier
Twitter
File
when
Bari
Weiss,
thinking
she
was
revealing
unfair
treatment
of
the
@LibsOfTikTok
account, actually revealed
it
was
on
a
similar
Xcheck
style
whitelist
that
clearly
showed
a
flag
on
the
account
saying DO
NOT
TAKE
ACTION
ON
USER
WITHOUT
CONSULTING an
executive
team.
That’s
all
background
that
finally
gets
us
to
the
Lee
Fang
story.
It
reveals
that
the
US
government
apparently
got
some
of
its
accounts
onto
this
whitelist
after
they
had
been
dinged
earlier.
The
accounts,
at
the
time,
were
properly
labeled
as
being
run
by
the
US
government.
But
here’s
the
nefarious
bit:
sometime
after
that,
the
accounts
changed
to
no
longer
be
transparent
about
the
US
government
being
behind
them,
but because
they
were
on
this
whitelist it’s
likely
that
they
were
able
to
get
away
with
sketchy
behavior
with
less
review
by
Twitter,
and
it
likely
took
longer
to
catch
that
they
were
engaged
in
a
state-backed
propaganda
campaign.
As
the
article
notes,
in
2017,
someone
at
the
US
government
noticed
that
these
accounts
—
which,
again,
at
the
time
clearly
said
they
were
run
by
the
US
government
—
were
somehow
limited
by
Twitter:
On
July
26,
2017,
Nathaniel
Kahler,
at
the
time
an
official
working
with
U.S.
Central
Command
—
also
known
as
CENTCOM,
a
division
of
the
Defense
Department
— emailed a
representative
with
the
company’s
public
policy
team,
with
a
request
to
approve
the
verification
of
one
account
and
“whitelist”
a
list
of
Arab-language
accounts
“we
use
to
amplify
certain
messages.”
“We’ve
got
some
accounts
that
are
not
indexing
on
hashtags
—
perhaps
they
were
flagged
as
bots,”
wrote
Kahler.
“A
few
of
these
had
built
a
real
following
and
we
hope
to
salvage.”
Kahler
added
that
he
was
happy
to
provide
more
paperwork
from
his
office
or
SOCOM,
the
acronym
for
the
U.S.
Special
Operations
Command.
Now,
it
seems
reasonable
to
question
whether
or
not
Twitter
should
have
put
them
on
a
whitelist
in
the
first
place,
but
if
they
were
properly
marked,
and
not
engaged
in
violative
behavior,
you
can
see
how
it
happened.
But
Twitter absolutely should
have
had
policies
stating
that
if
those
accounts
have
their
descriptions
or
names
or
whatever
changed,
the
whitelist
flag
should
automatically
be
removed,
or
at
least
sent
up
for
a
human
review
to
make
sure
it
was
still
appropriate.
And
that
apparently
did
not
happen.
As
The
Intercept
report
notes,
Twitter
at
this
time
was
under tremendous pressure
from
basically
all
corners
about
the
fact
that
ISIS
was
an
effective
user
of
social
media
for
recruitment
and
propaganda.
So
the
company
had
been
somewhat
aggressive
in
trying
to
stamp
that
out.
And
it
sounds
like
the
US
accounts
got
caught
up
in
those
efforts.
So
there
is
a
lot
of
interesting
stuff
revealed
here:
more
details
on
the
US
government’s
foreign
social
media
propaganda
campaigns,
and
more
evidence
of
how
Twitter’s
“whitelist”
program
works
and
the
fact
that
it
did
not
appear
to
have
very
good
controls
(not
that
surprising,
as
almost
no
company’s
similar
tool
has
good
controls,
as
we
saw
with
the
OSB’s
analysis
of
Xcheck
for
Meta).
But…
the
spin
that
“Twitter
aided
the
Pentagon
in
its
covert
online
propaganda
campaign,”
is,
yet
again,
kinda
missing
the
important
stuff
here.
Neither
the
Pentagon
nor
Twitter
look
good
in
this
report,
but
in
an
ideal
world
it
would
lead
to
more
openness
(a
la
the
OBS’s
look
into
Xcheck)
regarding
how
Twitter’s
whitelist
program
works,
as
well
as
more
revelations
about
how
the
DOD
was
able
to
run
its
foreign
propaganda
campaign,
including
how
it
changed
Twitter
accounts
from
being
public
about
their
affiliation
to
hiding
it.
This
is
where
it
would
be
useful
if
a
reporter
who
understood
how
all
this
worked
was
involved
in
the
research
and
could
ask
questions
of
Twitter
regarding
how
big
the
whitelist
is
(for
Meta
it
reached
about
6
million
users),
and
what
the
process
was
for
getting
on
it.
What
controls
were
there?
Who
could
put
people
on
the
whitelist?
Were
there
ever
any
attempts
to
review
those
who
were
on
the
whitelist
to
see
if
they
abused
their
status?
All
of
that
would
be
interesting
to
know,
and
as
Renee
DiResta’s
piece
noted,
would
be
the
kinds
of
questions
that
actual
experts
would
ask
if
Elon
gave
them
access
to
these
files,
rather
than…
whoever
he
keeps
giving
them
to.
Finally!
An
Interesting
Twitter
Files
That
Appears
To
Reveal
Sketchy
Government
Behavior
The
Copyright
Industry
Is
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To
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