What's the Deal with Twitterfiles?

To be honest I think it's fluff a piece to keep twitter in the spotlight and to drive user engagement. If they really had something new or better said something that wasn't known before they would release it in a more professional and descriptive manner.

Really the most interesting part so far was not the actual releases themselves, but that they discovered some "ex" fed lawyer at Twitter inserting himself into the process to "vet" the material being released to the journalists[0].

Other than that there haven't been any huge revelations, though it's important to note that what we know right now is incomplete. They're gonna be drip-feeding this stuff to us to drive engagement.

Regarding the first release concerning direct political influence, I don't think we will have a smoking gun at the end of this even if it really did happen. Everyone who works a corporate job knows that anything you write down in an e-mail will come back to haunt you eventually. Maybe sketchier things happened in those face to face meetings the Twitter execs were having with intelligence agencies and politicians but I don't think we will know in the end.

The second release about shadowbanning, deboosting etc. was more interesting since they actually have a more complete picture here. This basically confirmed a bunch of manipulation happening behind the scenes that people have been suspecting for a long time. I hope they keep digging on this, I'd be interested to know more about who decided who ends up on these blacklists and why. Maybe even release the raw data so we can come to our own conclusions.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/160024340584166604...

When it comes to anything contentious, everybody is going to be biased about the interpretation. You're probably better off making your own mind up about these kinds of things.

But I'd say there's a few journalists like Glenn Greenwald who maintain some credibility.

What characteristic makes any journalist credible? One hallmark of credibility for a journalist is that he's actually willing to call out his own idealogical "team" for their bullshit. Here was Glenn's take on this. Your interpretation of this may of course vary.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1601594896594644993

> The weekly meetings @yoyoel and other Twitter censors had with FBI, DHS, etc. constituted a union of state and corporate power to control the flow of information to the citizenry.

> "Fascism" has become abused to the point of meaninglessness but that's a defining hallmark.