Conservatives on like year 2 of staring at Hunter Biden's dick and Trump has yet to be named president. They'll keep trying though, scanning that thing like they're looking for the directions to treasure on the back of the declaration of independence
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) December 5, 2022
The Washington Post shows the NYTimes how to handle a deliberately confusing story responsibly — “Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds”:
It was billed as a bombshell: Elon Musk, after rifling through his new company’s internal files, would finally expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the critical run up to the 2020 election…
But by the time the dust settled Saturday, even some conservatives were grumbling that it was a dud. Musk’s Twitter Files produced no smoking gun showing that the tech giant had bent to the will of Democrats.
A handful of screenshots from 2020, posted over the course of two hours Friday evening in a disjointed, roughly 40-tweet thread, show the San Francisco company debating a decision to restrict sharing of a controversial New York Post story about the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party…
In the process, Musk took the extraordinary step of promoting the leak of internal company communications to Taibbi, exposing the names of several rank-and-file workers and Khanna’s personal email address.
The online mob descended on the Twitter workers on the chain, threatening them and circulating their photos online.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was among the employees named in the tweets, said in a social media post…
Musk’s promotion of the internal screenshots including employees’ names is largely unprecedented, and comes as he repeatedly says he will bring transparency to the platform. Taibbi said that he had to “agree to certain conditions” in exchange for the opportunity to cover the files in a message to his Substack subscribers, asking for their patience and acknowledging that his customers may be angry that the information appears on the social network first…
Worth reading the whole thing, but TL;DR: Both men further debased their already shaky reputations with both tech specialists and journalists.