Is Twitter dying?

You might be thinking so, considering the fact that we are living in a post-truth era and our perceptions are shaped by the mainstream media.

Nevertheless, you might be surprised to learn that Twitter is reporting all-time high numbers of users. I am already hearing the mumbles of "Are we really supposed to believe what Elon Musk says?" from the State of Affairs (SofA) readers but please bear with me.

I know that Musk spent $44 billion to buy the company and will do everything in his capacity to protect the well-being of his investment and do anything he can to make his purchase worthwhile.

Right here, just let me remind you of two simple facts: U.S. Republicans and other right-leaning people alike who were agitated by Twitter’s previous and overwhelmingly Democrat administration and left the platform are flocking back. And if that’s not a clear indication that Musk is speaking the truth, just 1.4% of 140,000 Musk haters – most probably liberal-leaning users – who threatened to leave the platform actually quit, according to a report by the New Scientist magazine.

When Musk acquired the platform, many liberals threatened to move to Mastodon, a "decentralized" social media platform whose aim is to dethrone Twitter one day.

"Only a handful of Twitter users who have threatened to leave the social network for open-source alternative Mastodon have actually deleted their Twitter accounts," New Scientist said in the article.

"An analysis of more than 140,000 Twitter users shows that although plenty of people have said they are leaving the site, only 1.6 per cent have wholly abandoned the platform, which was bought by entrepreneur Elon Musk in late October," the magazine added.

If we have established that the platform is far from dying, let’s see how the #TwitterFiles saga is unfolding.

'I order you'

The revelations, which apparently showcase pretty much a "chain of command" between the Democrat Party officials – particularly U.S. President Joe Biden’s campaign team – and Twitter’s previous administration, were all the talk on the platform last week.

Many liberal tweeps, who for some reason have not left the platform now run by the "neo-Nazi, far-right" Musk since he bought it, were quick to re-embrace the "Twitter is a private company and its steps to suppress freedom of speech do not violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment" argument.

The amendment "prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Does that even make sense? Not the amendment, of course, but rather the argument that "Twitter is a private platform" that basically ignores the fact that the platform is so entrenched in our lives and whatever happens there literally affects many aspects of our day-to-day life, our views and how we get our news among other things.

One of the adherents of the "Twitter is a private platform" argument was Ted Lieu, a U.S. Congressperson who "ordered" Musk to cease what he is doing.

"I’m in the government and I order you to stop posting stupid sh*t," he said.

"See why your post is wrong? Twitter can do whatever it wants as a private sector company when it comes to speech. And the Biden campaign team wasn’t the government. Trump was President in 2020," he said, explaining the message he wanted to convey with his harsh rhetoric.

But this tweet by Lieu was a quote from Musk’s tweet, which said, "Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a first amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is."

Apparently, the "Chief Twit" acknowledged the fact that yes, Twitter did not violate the First Amendment per se; but indeed, it did suppress free speech. Now please ask yourself one particular question here: Would you want to be on a platform that could basically shut you off for saying something not deemed kosher at its headquarters, even though you do not use any hate speech, do not incite violence, do not target any particular group of people or do not do anything illegal?

Draining the swamp

As we are going through one of the harshest periods of a "culture war" that is amplified to no end by the very existence of social media, it is expected that every debate will turn into a political one.

When former U.S. President Donald Trump was campaigning, "drain the swamp" was one of his most prominent catchphrases. Wherever he went, he used those three words that imply the existence of a deep "establishment" that allegedly controlled the mainstream media, pulled the strings in the government and directed U.S. policies at home and abroad.

It would be a stretch to claim that Trump managed to rid the American bureaucracy of the "establishment" and even whether such a group of people even exists – even though many signs point to its existence.

But it seems that it is now Musk’s turn to fight against the "establishment" – on social media.

'Handled'

Without further ado, let’s finally get to the revelations and why they matter.

The so-called "Twitter Files" were published on, you have guessed it right, Twitter – by prominent journalist Matt Taibbi.

"What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter," the journalist, who was immediately labeled a "Musk shill bought off with money" by his left-wing colleagues, said in a lengthy thread.

"The ‘Twitter Files’ tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out of the control of its designer," he added in a goosebump-inducing tweet.

Explaining that Twitter was, at least in its inception, meant to be a "laissez-faire, laissez-passer" platform without any barriers, the company was slowly forced to implement some restrictions with in-house tools to combat spam and financial fraudsters.

And that is totally fine. Anyone calling for terrorism, embezzling or abusing people should be stopped wherever they are. The problem begins to rear its ugly head when some people at the helm of a company that runs practically the modern-world equivalent of ancient Greek forums that matters so much for our freedom of speech, try to suppress ideas or arguments against their own worldviews – however progressive they might be and however regressive the users’ are. If someone does not cause harm with words, let them talk for God’s sake.

"By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled,’" Taibbi revealed in a tweet that got retweeted over a whopping 10,000 times.

"Handled"? Ask any linguist and they would vouch for the fact that this verb, at least in one single connotation, implies the existence of a situation where some people give orders and other people listen to said orders.

To be fair, Taibbi also said that Twitter indeed responded positively to some requests by the Trump White House, as well.

"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored," he said.

"However, this system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right," the journalist added with a tweet containing a screenshot of former Twitter workers’ contributions by the party of the recipient.

The screenshot is, to say the least, incredibly surprising even considering the former Twitter workforce’s staunchly pro-Democrat leanings, showing that 99.73% of all contributions went to Democrats. That’s $165,969 for the Blue team and a mere $451 for the Reds.

What Taibbi went on to expose was even more explosive – "how and why Twitter blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story."

A 2020 headline in the New York Post said "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad," referring to Biden's father, incumbent U.S. President Biden, who was the country's vice president by then. The story never gained any traction in the mainstream media, possibly due to Twitter’s filtering of the story and putting a stranglehold on its dissemination to the public.

"Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography," Taibbi said, going on to expose several emails between company officials, a harsh debate among them on whether Twitter would find itself in hot water for suppressing the story. The journalist also explained that the company put forth its "hacked materials policy" as an excuse.

"The problem with the ‘hacked materials’ ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a ‘whirlwind’ 24-hour, company-wide mess," he added in a later tweet.

As utterly obvious, culture wars are escalating with no signs of slowing down. And we have Elon Musk, who is out there as a dissenting voice against the dominant narrative.

Like I said in the beginning, this article is not a defense of Republicanism by any stretch of the imagination. I would write the exact same article if the camps had been reversed in this debate and liberals had been suffering from a pro-Republican Twitter administration with a "liberal" billionaire buying it to save the left-wingers from intellectual and expressional oppression; only the names would change.

What really matters is the fight against bigotry and suppression of the freedom of speech, whether it comes from the left or right.

Nothing else matters.