The 2022 Twitter Files

Published Feb 17, 2023, 4:00 PM

When tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he also stated he would bring more transparency to the inner workings of the social platform. Partnering with several veteran investigative journalists, Musk shared copious internal documents, requesting only that the journalists publish their findings on Twitter first. The result came to be known as the 2022 Twitter Files. To some, this work proves several long-running conspiracy theories. To others, it seems little more than overblown hype. So what's the scoop? Tune in to learn more.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben, and we're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Follow us on Twitter. I guess we should say. Yeah, um, let's see. So we have a Twitter account for the show, and I think too. Two of our hosts here are on Twitter and varying degrees. Matt, you're not on Twitter. Maybe I was at some point. I don't remember the account if I do have one. Yeah, I have an account, but I barely touch it. Um. I don't even lurk. Really, I just see tweets three posted on Instagram and other parts of the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm probably out of um. Out of the four of us, maybe not the five of us, fellow conspiracy realists listening today, you may be much more active, but out of our host production team, I'm probably the most active on Twitter. Uh, it's just an e. It has some advantages that work despite the fact that it is a dumpster fire very often. Uh, you might love Twitter, you might hate it. You probably hate it, but you've definitely heard about it. But there's lovely people in there. Ben The only way I interact with Twitter, as I go to I'm signed in, I guess as our company, and I go to the notifications thing and I just look at the usually awesome, wonderful things, cool people are saying. Right, Yeah, we have a very we have some great leads, we have some great listeners on Twitter, and we're you know, knock on wood as they say, I hope this is what I don't know, but knock on wood, as they say. We we have carved out with your help, folks, we have carved out actually relatively nice, cordial and informative place in our our little corner of Twitter. But a lot of Twitter is not like that. You know. It's a lot of Twitter is hot, takes maybe some shrill over reactions, but then every so often really meaningful news that some mainstream outlets would ignore otherwise. You know, like Twitter was instrumental to the Arab Spring Twitter has become a way of circumventing oppression by the state at certain times. It's been a way of communicating during disasters and am agencies, but also it has some dangerous stuff going on right now. If you think about it, Twitter has more than four hundred and fifty million active users, and those numbers get kind of kind of loosey goosey, right, They changed day to day. But that means if Twitter was a country, it would be the third largest in the world, just after China and India. And with that many people evolved. Is no otter. Twitter has become the subject of multiple conspiracies, No, Matt, I feel like at this point, before we lose people, we should say we're going somewhere with this, right like we have we have a reason we're talking about Twitter, and even if you're not on like on Twitter, this will still be interesting in some surprising ways. So here are the facts. And it's not all about Elon Musk. There's a little bit of that in here, but it's not all about him. This is a this is a bigger issue with Twitter for sure. I mean, Twitter began, like many startups, as an idea, uh in the mind of an undergrad. Uh. This one in particular at n y U. A guy you've probably heard of, though he's been less part of the story as of late, Jack Dorsey. Uh. In two thousand six, he shared the idea of online communication with his co workers at a place. It was actually an early podcasting company called Odio, which just to me sounds like odious audio. It doesn't It sounds like bad hot takes in audio farm. Yeah. And and think about that too. A podcasting company in two thousand and six, that's the term hadn't even coined, had it or it was maybe right around that time. Yeah, it's it's right after. It's like two years after the term is coined. There's already a company if you look into it. Journalist named Ben Hammersley apparently coined the term in The Guardian in February of two thousand four. But a podcasting company in two thousand and six, that's so nuts to me. Uh, this is not this is before you and I were working at How Stuff Works. This like, I don't think I was in the US at this time. I was. I was working at That Works in two thousand and six, all right, but we weren't really doing podcasts yet I think until around two thousand eight, right, yeah, because I joined up in two thousand seven, I think, so, yeah, this is nuts. So Jack Dorsey is in a very pioneering forward facing company and he comes up with this idea. He basically says, what if we had a social media platform where people couldn't say as much at once? What if? What if the world was one big group text? Yeah, And of course you know, it was the era, not that we're out still in it. Now we're more in the era of making up words that don't exist. But back then it was more about leaving out vowels. Um, so it was deep. Probably you'd still say it Twitter, but if you look at it now, be more like Twitter Twitter double T for d W T T r um. I gotta say, I know I've said this before, but a good friend of the show, uh Matt Riddle Um. He he was always kind of my shirp for new tech and you know, culture stuff and turn me onto records and movies and all kinds of neat stuff. But he's the first one that told me what Twitter was. And I was beyond skeptical. I was like, that sounds ridiculous. Who is going to use that. Why wouldn't you want to say as much as you can say. But the the what seems like a bug on the onset actually becomes the feature that editing that's built in is part of it. It's about pithy, quick responses. But the thing that he pointed out which I didn't get and which really required that adoption, was that it's going to be a bird's eye no pun intended, view into the lives of famous people that's gonna be unfiltered. And that's really kind of what made it take off was that it was this, you know, getting rid of the pr person Um, it's it's this these direct takes, you know, from people that you would not otherwise really understand what their life was about. Well, yeah, and that's a great business idea, right if you could sell enough people on it, which Jack did. But just imagining Twitter in the beginning as a base camp, campfire, I'm trying to think about Monday dot com or one of these like slack channels, Like that's kind of kind of how it began, right, an internal company talking to themselves. But like, right, but that was it, right, just how Facebook started as like college campus. Yeah, yeah, so like the uh. Friend of the showcase e Pegram and I had extensive conversations about this, talking about the recursive loop of discourse on the Internet, on social platforms, Twitter and most social media. The best way to think of it is two mirrors facing one another, right, creating endless reflections, and its that that purport to be that purport to be original, and the I have this in the not it's the primary the primary advantage of Twitter is is yes, the idea of unfiltered access, but I would go a bit further. We'll we'll talk about this in today's episode. I'll go a bit further and say it's not the access really, if you think about it, it's a Faustian bargain. And what you're saying is I will get this insight, get this possible look past the filters of spin and past the marketing and the pr and the agents and the managers, and in return I run the risk that one day I will be exposed in a similar manner. It's kind of like the stone chair in Black Monday Murders, which we keep I keep bringing up anyway, but now everybody's got one, and everybody everybody's in the stone chair. Everybody's a micro celebrity, you know, like the micro system, because that's what Twitter was called, right, micro blogging in the beginning, And like you know, I was intensely skeptical. I was thinking, this is so limiting. Surely people wants more nuanced consideration of ideas, and I was very wrong. Do you think it predicted the decaying attention span of of human beings or maybe caused it to some degree? I don't know. Yeah, it's a bit chicken and egg back when eggs were cheaper. It's it's tough because we we know that there's still very um there's still very nuanced, very intelligent conversation on Twitter. But like a lot of social media, it is what you make it, and you're kind of fighting this fight where you you attempt to curate what you want to see, what you want to think about, versus what this private entity wants you to see, what it wants you to think about. And that's where the story kind of that that's where we get to write. I just want to say, there's a really interesting example, like a perfect illustration of this that we're going to talk about. When it comes to a certain reporters reporting via Twitter, on the Twitter files that you see both of those things happening at the same time. Ben, It's really interesting. Yeah, it's a it's a dangerous symphony. Right. So so back to our buddy Jack right. Jack is right now is kind of like a pre MySpace Tom, you know. And like we said, he's making this as a pet project for his colleagues at odio. Right, you can send your l A L O L S L m aos to each other anyway, that guy Isaiah and marketing is hilarious and so on and so on. And then in July fifteen, two thousand six, this gets introduced to the public. And this is kind of like when Facebook no longer required you to be at you know, attending a certain institution or any academic institution at all. And during the first few months the website gets something like tweets every twenty four hours. This would be the Matt Riddle age. We love Matt Riddle on this show. So Matt, if you're listening, shout out. This is when the early adopters, like the Jonathan Strickland's of the world are getting into Twitter. And in just a year that number trebles. It grows to six deep thousand, tweets. Uh. And then Twitter goes to south By Southwest just like stuff they don't want you to know, that's right, folks. They were thinking, yeah, yeah, we're they were they were thinking of a show that didn't exist, and they said, we've got to be like this show. But south By Southwest was a game changer for Twitter, right, Yeah, just two years on, the service just absolutely exploded, you know, from sixty tweets a day to three hundred thousand tweets a day. Uh. And then two years after that and we're talking fifty million tweets a day. How Yah, That's what I'm saying, like, how do you you know? And I guess this is also you know, Twitter really is what kind of popularized or maybe even you know, mainstream the hashtag because that was the only way you could kind of um filter all of that insane amount of information you know, around categories or you know, trending topics or whatever it might be with a simple tag that was just you know, uh number sign and a word. And it was at first, like I remember not understanding the you know, computer science e part of it, but it really was a way of categorizing all those things and you could search for things by hashtag. Maybe the search features weren't quite as robust at first, but that ultimately became very important, especially when we start talking about, you know, some of those game changing, very important uses of Twitter that actually had ramifications in a global, you know, political way. Yeah, I think it's important to remember that these aren't I don't like a lot of social media posts on other platforms, a post becomes like a piece of content that is used, and then a bunch of people comment on it, and maybe that original user comments a couple of times. It's in my mind, Twitter is one ongoing conversation that like begins that usually with one tweet or one picture or something like that, and then it it sprawls. Like the Twitter conversations become conversations, not just comments. Right, there's a there's a very big difference between the comments section in a place and then a Twitter conversation where people are adding each other and then having splinter conversations. You see the best and the worst of people and of robots. But but also I think inherent in what you're describing, Matt, is that limited uh length of the individual communications because it allows other people to fill in those gaps. And either continue the conversation add their bit in a way that the original poster couldn't have possibly just by the very fact of the limited number of characters. And that's where you get the spiciness. Yeah, to Internet characters, you could start threading things, right, You'll see, I've read there's one amazing, uh, one amazing story that always stays with me from this lady who goes on an ill faded journey with uh sex worker and the sex workers boyfriend and the sex workers pimp, who are two different dudes, and this thing this goes viral and it's a very long story. It's well written, it's well told, but it's a ton of tweets at only two characters at a time. And over the past almost twenty years now, seventeen years, Twitter has in a very real, very weird way, change the world, or at least it's had some hot takes about the world changing. This is where you see people pre TikTok arguing that Earth is flat, or the moon is fake, or you're hallucinating your ring finger or whatever. Right that just yeah, but it fits right. Everybody looked at their hand do that. So yeah, so that gives us that unfiltered access the public figures celebrities and celebrity worship is gross, but it's a big part of why it's Twitter works. And this also gives a lot of wholesome interaction and a lot of stuff the old Internet would call cringe, like the President of the United States talking trash right, no filters, lots of typos misspelled, gets typos pointed out, doubles down and says no, I'm meant to say co fefe, and people who understand what I'm saying get what I mean because God's coming. Yeah, God forbid I make a typo. Um. And also, I admit I loved cafefe. I loved it. I was I was walking around like I was bugging Matt going by and just like whispering the same way that Marvel characters say hell hell, Hydra still have nightmares spent. But that's fine. But but it's interesting because we've also watched the previous administration for the first time use Twitter as a platform to get messaging out while the while they were in office. Right, so interesting, there's so many different uses of a platform like this. Well, you know, with the celebrity unfiltered stuff, that's all fun. And games. Right, But when you start having a head of state communicate in such an unfiltered direct way, that can have real ramifications that even members of that administration are not crazy about a hundred percent, right. And remember the president before the Twitter president uh had there was a huge controversy about whether or not that guy could keep his BlackBerry, right because people were worried about security. Yeah, Pepperdge farm remembers, and so this, uh, this is nuts because just picture it. Now, someone who literally works at the United Nations doing important stuff is still there. They're experiencing that Matt level co f F a PTSD. They're like, I'm in charge of trying to save millions of lives, and now I have to go check in Twitter to see whether or not the president of the US is going to launch a nuke, right, I have to. Let's let's hope he's in a good mood today. And I mean, you know, those ramifications they were talking about could result in somebody else launching a nuke because of a typo or because you know what I mean. Like, it just really removes the rains entirely from the geopolitical stallion, if you will, I'm reminded of our conversation with Dan Harmon when he was talking about how one of the only things that made him feel better in the time of the Trump presidency was if if the president was having a bad day visually on Twitter, Right, So if there was a visual representation of a bad day, which you know, confounded me at the time, but it makes I guess it makes sense. It's just it's so strange to me to think how much power this this thing had us. Yeah, and this again, uh, probably the best comparison for Twitter is, uh, that's comparison for a lot of things. Is the Sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia, right to build a better mop, uh, and the mops get out of control. The mops are the tweets, you know, And it's it's not even like the tech behind a platform like Twitter as somehow next level or anything. It's it's text. It's the simplest. I mean, would maybe remember when you couldn't even put a picture on Twitter. It had to be like a link to a picture. So it really is just the highest you know, end of the tech is all of that organizing stuff that I'm talking about earlier, but in general, compared to like say Instagram or Facebook that has all kinds of different channels and images and things like that. Twitter is dirt simple. It was really just a matter of Dorsey being the first to market with a thing that caught on and then became those uh, those brooms or mops or whatever that from the source or as apprentice m Yeah, and you know, with this, this episode has probably given me a long one. It might end up being a two parter. But we're we're laying the land here, right. We want you to know the background. Uh, and let's before we go to the break, let's talk a little bit about the recent changes. The big, big recent change in Twitter happened in October of twenty two. Through a various series of negotiations, misadventures, and poison pills, a now fifty one year old Emerald mine Air uh named Elon Musk, finalized a deal to buy Twitter for forty four billion US dollars. You can find him there now. Uh. He is very active. He's tweeting everything from memes to political stances, ideological stuff updates on the Twitter platform. He responds to critics and fans alike. Let's go ahead and read latest tweet because you know, we want him to get his money's worth here. Uh. Elon Musk also, of course CEO famously of Tesla and very involved with PayPal and so on. Um he just an hour ago he said, gig of Berlin is the machine that builds the machine. Cool. I have to do some digging on that. Hold on, guys, I've got a uh someone here that says Elon Musk, Yes, totally me, totally Elon. Is that is that Elon Musk? Is that the one sounds like him? Yeah, it's kind a picture of him. He used to see it used to say King Twitch or something like that was what he changed his little about me too. Can I just add really quickly when you say he finalized that forty four billion dollar deal, he essentially was forced to put his money where his mouth was because he you know, made all this you know, fuss about how he's gonna buy twere and essentially ended up getting forced to buy it for a pretty inflated rate. Uh. And we're gonna get to, obviously what happened when he started taking charge, some of which was his fault and some of which is just the nature of a platform that maybe is no longer the newest kid on the block. Yeah, Twitter has had historically a very difficult time with monetization, which is, you know, the fancy capitalist word for how do we make this thing that people like also make money for us. Twitter has been very valuable to a lot of people, activist, journalists, so on, but it is not been really delivering money for the the investors and the capitalists involved. A lot of Musk sought to change that. Very forward looking investor and champion of various kinds of technology SpaceX would be one of the most exciting things there. But as soon as he acquired Twitter in you are right now, it's it's kind of a poison pill that was given to him. Um check out check out poison pill if you want to understand more about how those deals get sneaky and snarky. Shortly after he gets Twitter, he becomes embroiled in a conspiracy. And that is our episode today. What the heck are the Twitter files? We're gonna pause for word from our sponsors and we'll be back. Here's where it gets crazy. December twenty twenty two, not too long ago, just a few months after Ony taking ownership of Twitter. Like we said, he got ahold of it in October and Elon Musk starts sending things to journalists because now he has the keys to the car, right he has he he has bought the tesla that is Twitter, and he's in the driver's seat and he is able to go through a out of stuff that you could only access if you own the company. And so he reaches out to these journalists and he says, I got behind the curtain, I'm in the nuts and bolts, I'm in the weeds. I've got the I am the inside source now right, And I want you journalists, veterans that I respect. I want you to look at all this stuff. I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give it to you for free, exclusive access, and all I ask is that you publish it on Twitter first. Very meta, right and not a bad coffee, not a deal breaker. It's if you're a journalist, that's a hard thing to say no to, right. Yeah. And he reached out. I mean he respected these journalists because there they were each excellent in their field, like just each one is made of excellence, and uh man, when they did it, it wouldn't be cool to be made of excellence. Um well, I like it. It's a motto for something, and I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think, give the funniest product. Yeah, this is good. Oh yeah, Miller like made of excellence. The beer is so good you can drink it with your mouth. Okay, Sorry, Well I don't know what my point was. He reached out to legitimate people who would legitimize UH the things that he was fighting, right, who would lend credibility to the story that Ellen wanted to tell through these documents. Yeah, and I mean he was, in theory, delivering on a promise that he made before finishing that acquisition. He has always been an advocate of free speech except where it concerns him. UM and he believed that censorship on the platform had been motivated politically or the very least ideologically, UM and he assisted in releasing this treasure trove information including internal Slack messages and emails from officials top top folks of the company that confirmed UH some key decisions decisions to suppress certain new stories, for example one on the eve of the U. S presidential election UM that concerned Joe Biden, concerned damaging information about Joe Biden. These files were also showing certain inner workings that discussed banning former US President Donald Trump from the platform entirely after the followers of that president attacked the capital um of the United States on January six one. And you know, we know that it was ultimately argued that he used that platform to encourage that to a degree, and that could be seen as violation of the terms and services of Twitter. But we'll get into that a bit more down the road. Yeah, yeah, I'm not defending it. But again, is just is like yolo, you know, it's just just go for it. The memes alone. I should, I I should, and be so tickled by that. I think I've lost touch with reality, to be honest with you. Uh, And that's what Twitter is all about. So isn't that funny? It's simultaneously about being hyper in touch with reality, but depending on the echo chamber that you tune into, it can make you completely detached from reality. Again, it as a tool in your arsenal can be very useful, but if you're just fully down the Twitter rabbit hole in a particular direction, can isolate you from everything else completely. One brilliant thing about Twitter is that it weaponizes and exacerbates some of the cultic indoctrination practices we've talked about for years. One of the big ones being uh. And this is just a very specific example. As we're moving through this, one of the big ones being the use of jargon, the character limit that existed for so long, not like required you to use abbreviations, to use acronyms, right to use shortened slang. And this kind of jargon gives people an inclusive feeling of them versus us feeling, which further pushes them toward extreme beliefs. And I'm not necessarily talking about terrorism or like the Black Hand or any any kind of stuff like that. What I'm talking about it like it could be. It could be people talking about teken, it could be people talking about philosophy. It just encourages the rabbit holing, the nicheness of it all. And that's why, that's why the black box is so important and so scary. Twitter is very much a black box. That's what Elam Musk love him or had Um wanted to try to fix. At least that's what he said. So he releases eight loose installments of what we call the Twitter Files. So the first is something a lot of people have asked us about on the show in the past, which is the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. This is called an October surprise. Right right before an election, you want to release a story that puts your um, your opponent in the race in a bad light, right at the very least on the defensive, you know, big time, because it sucks tell the air out of their particular room and forces them to address that instead of doing the important bits that you should be doing on the eve of an election. Are very close to an election, right, If you're responding, you're not progressing exactly exactly. That's a really good way to think about it. Ben, Like on a timeline moving forward, you can't talk about the new thing that is going to get you to the next place. You gotta keep addressing this day gum thing about my son and a laptop and Ukraine and access to the president. Which but at the same time, guys, I gotta tell you, looking more into this um, it doesn't um. It doesn't feel credible at all at first when you start diving into it, because like, wait, that happened. Wait then that happened, and then you start to go wait a second, hold one smoke crack. Yeah, and you know what, there do they make the best decisions. I'm not saying they're bad people. I'm just saying sometimes they don't make the best decisions. And maybe we do an episode on that, right, I think I think we should. I think it's due diligence and it's time because at the beginning, you know, it was so politicized that people were being very tribal about it and we didn't have the ability to look objectively at the facts and the allegations of conspiracy, which is what this show is all about. So now we can, and we want to thank everybody listening for your patients. Everyone has written to us about this. We wanted to make sure that we had the facts right and we weren't falling for smoke and mirrors, which is a huge part of this. But hey, shout out to anyone of those journalists who did work on the Twitter files if you want to, we'd love to discuss it with you in a full episode. And so the idea the laptop controversy, just in the headline, like the log line of this as a film, is that a guy named Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who is the U S President, as we record, uh had a laptop and it was found abandoned at a computer shop in the state of Delaware. It was taken there by somebody. It was taken there by somebody, and according to according to Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and lawyer for Donald Trump for a time, this laptop contained evidence that the Biden dynasty was crooked and in bed with the government of Ukraine. Interesting, this is very helpful for Vladimir Putin, right, and the rationale for the invasion of Ukraine, Well, the second invasion of Ukraine. The first one was taking Crimea and the world didn't do dick about it. But well, let's talk about what what the allegation was there. And the concept is that Hunter Biden was attempting to sell access to his father, right, so like, to the highest echelons of US government for generally business interests in Ukraine. Yeah, and this is something that has the the idea of influence and lobbying. As we know, it's it's a very murky space, right, So again we're gonna do an episode on this. What you need to know now, if you've ever heard of this controversy, is that the laptop was late are verified as belonging to this guy Hunter Biden, and some of the emails found on the laptop were authenticated. So the first Twitter files installment focuses on the fallout from this. There's a story that runs in the New York Post, which is a legit source of news, and this story is based on files from that laptop. And the journalist at the Post say, we got this information from Rudy Giuliani and from a guy who works with Trump named Steve Bannon. Now this is before Steve Bannon became radioactive and got provably, provably included in attempting to orchestrate the overthrow of democracy in the United States. That was his conspiracy. It's not a theory. He tried it. It didn't work. I'm sure he has a podcast, a Twitter and Facebook. This is the truth thing though, right, every everybody get Nobody comes out looking good on this one. Twitter and Facebook both limited the ability for users to share the laptop story. They purposely because they control the FAWCET, right, so they purposely turned the FAWCET down and all the sudden people were getting shadow banned and they couldn't they couldn't share this story. Twitter even this is true. Twitter even suspended the New York Post account. It just really quickly. Shadow banning is where you're not kicked off the platform, but your reach is severely limited, isn't that right? Yeah, and you're not really made aware of it, but you just kind of can tell, because I don't know, how can you tell? I guess I guess you can look at your your analytics and to see that your posts are not reaching as many people as they used to, and if it gets to a certain level that that would fall under being shadow bands or you could use a second account. There are a couple of different ways. Yeah. Uh, and that's the that's the second installment of the Twitter Files, all about shadow banning. But soap this uh this first one right Uh? The platforms themselves say, hey, we kind of made mistakes, right we We just had editorial concerns because we didn't know whether or not this story was true, whether it was like propaganda due to the election. But the real sticky part, and I'm just gonna refer Matt Tybee's Twitter feed, is how I learned about this. I'm sure you guys did too originally, but in those like short messages, right, they were just cascading. And in there he talks about how and shows images from the Twitter fives files, the emails about how internally Twitter gets requests from political parties. Both parties are the two major ones in in the US to suppress a story or to like prevent a story from getting big, and they take they take requests from both sides. But I think one of the major things that it pointed out with regards to especially this story, is that the Democratic Party was way more effective for one reason or another, whether it was personal beliefs of the you know, individual employees working at Twitter or Twitter itself and their policies, was they were tending to allow those actions to be taken. The suppressing of a story in this one in particular, and with owning the doorway, with owning the platform, that becomes very close to pushing the election right to fixing fixing the match. And they're the tech company side of this is they will say, look, we got we got burned because we fell for the Russian hack. We we fell for these d n C email leak things. We didn't want to we didn't want to make the same mistake getting but as any long time conspiracy realist knows, when you attempt to ban something in this way, you create the Streisand effect, uh, and that that's named after Barbra Streisand who tried to get people to stop sharing a picture. And of course, at being the Internet, everybody went nuts and way more people shared the picture or something right, yeah, or the or the Cobra effect that we talked about in ridiculous history. Things get out of hand. So if you were on the fence about whether or not there was a conspiracy, then you see Twitter shutting down any conversation about it that can prove to you that there is a conspiracy afoot. And just within a few days, Twitter reversed to that block and changed its policies internally unhacked materials. So this would be a tweak I imagine to the terms of service, but they were still blocking it. Essentially, it's just now there's a pop up with that states you know their policy on hacked materials. But the question becomes was the laptop hack? Like did that constitute hacked materials? There's a lot it's it gets so complicated, but like it was basically Twitter justifying their actions because to answer the question that you just asked, Matt would require knowledge of how that laptop was obtained, whether it was had to be decrypted or broken into in order to get that information. Is that the Is that the deal? Yeah? I mean that, Tom, in my mind, that's what's happening here. At least if you read through the the emails that are out there and exist, it feels like they were trying to come up with a reason to keep the materials either difficult to access or impossible to access. Right, So again, what's what's the motivation? Is ideological? Right? And if Twitter were in deed a public square and not a private entity, the answer would be clear. One must be transparent. But that's that's the sticky wicket will get to in a second. But also just there whether they did anything about it, uh, to you know, you're liking Matt, or to anyone's liking or in a really effective way. There was a public apology at the very least, So doesn't something CEO is typically do. Right. Jack Dorsey Uh, still CEO at the time, said, essentially mistakes were made, uh, and they reversed the they reversed the decision, but the damage was done, right. That's why retractions are never printed on the front page. Yeah, and so we mentioned the second installment, which was the or we kind of prefaced this. That's the shadow banning, So details about shadow banning come out. Shadow banning basically is like, imagine you've got a chorus of people singing and they each have a microphone, right, and you cut one person's mike, so they still feel like they're singing. They're hearing other people sing and they think they're singing along, but they don't know their mike has been cut. This happened to um. Remember the Band, the documentary about the band? I think, uh, Robbie Robertson the kind of the the guy who like which one for the drummer talking about the last Waltz or last last Waltz. Yeah, uh so his his mike is cut in a lot of those songs, and it looks like he's singing, but but you yeah, if you pay attention, you're not hearing them. Well, that's so interesting because I actually watched that recently. I think it's one of the great concert documentaries. And one thing that's noteworthy about it is those guys they all sing together. Typically. Um, I did not know about this but they have really great Mike um technique. They are all backed away from the mics and singing quite loud, so one could argue it created becomes this like singular voice as opposed to an individual voice popping out here and there anyway, So yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just being being a nerd about that film. I'm quite a fan, So yeah, I'm mentioning. I'm mentioning the band because I I love them and I think that's a good example of shadow banning. So you still haven't said which band you're talking about the one I'm just I'm sorry. Lavon helm Is uh is the guy who I think got really short changed in the nominal drums and sing sing h Yeah, and he does it with a plumb. So the third installment of the Twitter Files, again we're on three of eight centers entirely on banning the president of the United States or the politician and then the president, Right, Donald Trump? Should we ban this guy? Uh? Is? Is he a does he qualify as a private user? Has he violated Twitter's terms of service? Right? Being a private entity, Twitter has the ability to codify their own laws. Right, those are the terms you agree to when you use the private service and they ultimately do decide to ban them. And then there's the fourth installment. These all kind of build on each other, right, UM it talks about the attack on the United States January six and you get this you see inside or under the hood of Twitter, where you see the employees reacting to what's happening at the Capitol. The fifth installment then went back to the Trump ban and all of the machinations behind that explored how Twitter employees decided to ban the former president. Um. Then the sixth installments described how the FBI got in touch with Twitter to suggest that some action be taken against several accounts for what they saw as the spreading of election disinformation. Which is kind of a weird thing in the time when you can say whatever you want, and you know, even if it's wrong or purposefully wrong, are you allowed to have the FBI investigate you? H Like a lot I know, right, Like a lot of people don't know the extent to which intelligence agencies have influenced editorial boards of so called independent journalist outfits. Right. New York Times UH historically has has played ball with state intelligence services. What was that operations? What was it called? Band is where intelligence agencies put specialists inside media companies. Mockingbird Operation mocking Bird Yeah, uh yeah, real thing, real conspiracy, uh the and it's spooky, right, it's scary. So the seventh installment goes back to the Hunter Biden story and it shows how Twitter works with the U. S intelligence community to game plan how to handle the info. And then the eighth installment, right, the last one shows Twitter one percent agreeing to shill propaganda for Uncle Sam by white listing accounts from Sentcom United States Central Command for the purposes of propaganda in other countries. So maybe white listing maybe we define that real quick? Is that just? What is it? It's like an inclusion list essentially, as opposed to you know, it's always when you allow certain things to come through, right, like an improved list um of with permissions. Wise, I reckon, like you can you can do that with applications on your computer, you can exclude certain things or white list certain things. You can do that with websites as well. Does that mean increasing reach somehow within the Twitter like cars of Twitter? That's a good question. I just know white listing in general means something gets through and things that are blacklisted the opposite there they don't get through, so maybe they got some special love, right yeah, but ultimately we're talking about propaganda, right, like that's some Voice of America stuff. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And maybe hey, maybe if this show doesn't work out, we can all, uh the three of us can just go work for a Voice of America. Hush your mouth that says no and talk about so. Uh we are going to pause for work from our sponsors as we fill out our Voice of America applications. Uh Mats, Matt, Okay, Well we'll see how you feel at the end of the at the end of this break and we're back. All right, Matt, are you uh are you on board with Noel? Lolany I'll do it. I'll do it too. I just have to have some kind of name that's like really sticking it to him, Like, uh, my name will be hog Dahmer scold beautiful love it. So before we get before we get Shadow band with prejudice for for a beautiful bit of word play. Man. Uh. We have to admit this was huge. Those Twitter files released were huge. They were very niche in some ways, right, they were talking to an audience that had already been converted to a certain degree of tribalism, and they were easy for some people to ignore, right, but this inspired a lot of people. The folks who were targeted with these releases were very highly motivated by them. Some politicians vowed to hold congressional investigations, but people still don't agree about how huge or meaningful these files actually were. Musk saw this as a smoking gun, a confirmation of a long running right wing conspiracy theory. And you may remember this, folks, Um, there's this idea is very popular in past years, this idea that social media is somehow inherently very left wing and that if you are a right wing politician, you are going to be unfairly censored because these commies in charge of social media hate what you stand for. Maybe, uh, that's the theory is they were Also we've seen, you know, with that that does seem to be there seems to be a little bit of sand behind that when it comes to the way Twitter addressed certain issues, especially when it came to left leaning politicians. But we also know that social media at large has gone the other way in a big way as well, in terms of you know, infiltration of potentially you know, allegedly infiltration of Russian influence and UH and disinformation. Uh that is more right leaning. So is it inherent in the platform? Maybe some of these decisions highlight instances where it was, but overall, I would say no, not inherent to social media at large. Like it's some cabal you know of of left leaning individuals that are trying to just wreck things for the right. I just I don't buy that. Yeah, I mean, it's like a lot of claims. It feels a little reductive, and the idea of a persecution complex is a very powerful tool, especially if you want to push authoritarian beliefs. You know, Benito Mussolini was able to accrue a great deal of power and influence by weaponizing persecution complexes. It's it's quite common in fascism. And just remember that four hundred and fifty million active users on Twitter alone, uh, comparing it to the third largest country in the world. With a number like that, there has to be some nuance, you know what I mean, Like, it's it doesn't make sense that it would be all one way or the other. You know, we're just seeing a couple of instances in a grand scheme of things. Imagine all the stuff we don't know. Again, this isn't like everything. This is just the Twitter files, just some documents that were released about a specific instance. It's very true, but they're in there. Just something that Matt Tybee points out in reporting was the balance, right, and should there be a or a fifty fifty balance if you've only got two political parties in any country for a thing like theoretically there should be right, everybody gets treated equally, all the opinions get treated equally, all the stuff being said, But just the point that the individual staff members. If you're looking at a pie chart, are you know above well above like democrat leaning or I guess what, you know what whatever, you would be considered democrat leaning. And that fact mixed with the way some of these tools are used in the communication lines that are open right, because you would a lot of times just reach out to someone on Twitter and say, hey, we've got some stuff to review. Here's a list of list of tweets and status is we need you to review, and then Twitter would respe on back, okay, handled those right? Yeah, And and then also the people at the top are are humans, which means they may feel an emotional or moral imperative to do certain things right, and ultimately it's up to them. There's no law against them doing this on a private platform. That's that's the issue. Also with the idea of the persecution theory, there are you know, there is some sand to it. As we said, if you look at some modern studies, like recent statistics, what you see is that misinformation and propaganda on social media overall, it spreads much more successfully if it's on the if it's right right wing, right the and to a certain extent, the more extreme the better. There's a goldilocks zone of it. Not to say there isn't left wing misinformation, it just doesn't spread as well. So so the persecution thing, and it's it's a powerful narrative, but be be careful with an exercise skepticism when you hear it, because sometimes people are trying to portray themselves as a victim as a way of tricking you into agreeing with them, even if it is against your better interest just objectively. Uh. But the big point is two people who bought into this again with validity. This confirmed that people were being silenced for not following the official line. And folks are saying, hey, that's the opposite of what Twitter is supposed to be about, and there was an equal and opposite reaction because of course it's Twitter. So there were a lot of journalists in the tech space and even former Twitter employees who are saying, ah, Elon Musk is over hyping this. We already know that it's messy. To your point, Matt, to try to to your point and old to try to get everybody to agree, like, we know they're tough decisions. We're kind of pioneers. We're the ones writing the rule book. We're building. As the corporate types like to say, we're building the airplane while we're flying, right, So it's we're not yeah right, it's terrible way to build an airplane. So they're saying like these are innocent mistakes rather than some grand conspiracy. And that's our question. Has Elon Musk exposed a conspiracy? Did he over hype things? Was he on the money? I mean maybe a little bit of both? Do you think so? Yeah? I do. I I do think it's a little bit of both. Because again, Elon Musk, I guess he's more of a libertarian than a hard right leaning individual. But even that's debatable. Uh, he does seem to be a free speech first, no matter what the implications. Again, though this is not an episode entirely about Elon Musk, we've also seen him uh contradict that ideology when it comes to him himself and uh and and people doing things that make him look bad. You know, he will then h take action to prevent that from happening, like with the Elon plane tracker and all of that stuff, and and things that are that are vexing to him but are technically, you know, public information that is just being put out there under the tenets of free speech. So it's hard to take a guy like that seriously when he's constantly do as I say, not as I do. Um, that's my biggest beef with with Elon. I can't tell you guys. I did something very uncharacteristic and I ended up watching roughly a quarter of the Super Bowl last night, just some sort of sports game. It is a sports ball game. Um, the the Birds lost, but the case's one. So the red and white team won and the greenish black team lost because their cleats apparently were not sufficient for the type of crown. That's that's what I kept. That's what And someone has the ball. That's the cleats again, change those out. So during the broadcast, it was somewhere in the third quarter when I turned it on just to see if I could even get it on my system here and the first one of the first things I saw on the screen guys, and they cut up to, uh, well, I saw our our friend brad Cooper, Bradley Cooper up there with a mirror. He was hanging out with a mirror, Quest Love, Quest Love and the And there was a shot of Rupert Murdoch sitting down just housing some food from the stadium, sitting next to Elon Musk, and they were commenting about, oh, look at the look at the power of those two seats. Wow. A well, Rupert signs our check. So anyway, also there Ellen likes to uh kind of cast himself as a different type of gazillionaire than Rupert Murdoch. Uh. And you know, while sitting next to each other in a sports ball game doesn't necessarily mean that you share all of the same you know, ideas. It's not a great look either, you know. Yeah, yeah, And also it's we have to assume that that is packaged publicity too, right, So this is where it gets very very tricky, you know. Uh, we have to realize that the controversy here ultimately if we're talking about Twitter and not the not necessarily the Biden stuff, which we will do in a future episode. If we're talking about just Twitter, then we have to realize this is a privately owned, for profit entity that simultaneously gets treated as though it is a public town square. It's a hybrid, and a lot of times you will hear people treat it as public or private according to the convenience of whatever helps them the most in what they're saying. So it's like it changes on how I feel it will work for me. Is what public figures are saying. They have a problem. It's a public space, free speech, they want something shut down, it's a private space. And that applies to Musk himself. He's always used on the town square argument, and that's why he claims that he bought the thing because it's so important and it needs to be you know, handled by someone that understands it, you know, because it was being you know, poorly managed, which the proof is definitely in the pudding. As soon as you know, Musk came on, it really created problems and it seems so transparent that all of the moves he's making are to protect his ludicrous investment, uh in a platform that had no way to make anywhere near that kind of money, and by you know, adding the for pay blue checkmark. And now they're even doing things that were like a joke a year ago, like oh, I bet you I'll that it'll be like New York Times, where once I've read a certain number of articles, it's gonna like, you know, limit me. And they're talking about literally doing that on Twitter, where like unless you a premium account, you can only read x number of tweets per day or t tweet x number of times per day. Maybe I'm getting those mixed up, but it's something along those lines. All of this stuff so clearly is not too better and further the town square model, but it's to make sure that Ellen makes his money back. Uh yeah, yeah, because again for profit entity, even though it has become a sort of public square and very important one, whether you love it or hate it. And if you look at the heart of the argument about the Twitter files social media in general, you see that is the issue that is the great dilemma. Intelligence companies are super deep in bed with social media, look at look at c I a stuff like in Q tell and ask yourself some hard questions about transparency. But still, social media is a private enterprise. That means ultimately the folks who own the door or keep the gates decide what goes through. And that's why those algorithms are proprietary black boxes. As we're recording now, millions of people are trying to figure out our cane algorithms, not just in social media, but also in things like Apple or Spotify. How do we know what gets to the top? How do we make our stuff get to the top? And those companies, including Twitter or under absolutely no legal compulsion to show their work or indeed explain themselves. That's why countless tragedies occur across the planet every single day, and all you might see in your feed is a bunch of Yahoo's arguing about the color of address. Remember that one? Remember what was? It was like? I never saw the blue, I only saw the beige or the gold whatever. Talking about arguing you guys, I just had to say before we end this episode. So through through this I ended up looking at a lot more of the Hunter Biden laptop stuff than I even expected. And I found another New York Post article where it's a short video from December twenty nineteen. Is that true? Yeah, December twenty nineteen of Joe Biden talking at a town hall in Iowa, and somebody, just somebody in the audience just asks Joe Biden just right to his face, like standing pretty close to him, about the laptop and his son and selling access you know in Ukraine and in Europe and y'all. Joe Biden's reaction to this guy who's just asking a question. He wasn't the guy wasn't like being mean about it, you know what I mean, or like super accused, or he asked him a question about it. Joe Biden's really like like, oh, you're a liar man. Do you want to do push ups? Come on, I'll do more push ups and you let's go overweight. Yes. He he challenges the dude to do push ups. He calls him overweight. He's like basically goes in on this guy, like, um, somebody who's you know. He he didn't actually want to talk about the thing. He just was like, bro, let's fight. It was one of the strangest things. It was one of the strangest things. Yeah, I don't know how to. I feel like if you ask somebody a question and they respond with a push up challenge, unless your question is about push ups, it's yeah, it's kind of an attempt at matrix dodge. That's nuts. That's nuts. So okay, But we have to ask did Elon Musk do the right thing by releasing the Twitter files? I would say yes, I would say it jibes vibes with the idea of transparency. But what we have to also remember is the Twitter files didn't go directly to you the public. The Twitter files went to reporters, and those reporters pick and choose what they release, so it goes through several filters. We have no idea what was left out. That's true. I mean, Paul, we can leave that pause there because because what what was the stuff that they didn't want you to know? I mean, I don't know. This is this conversation has gone a lot of places, and you we got we went a little long, but I feel like we we brought up a lot of questions that are very difficult to answer. I mean, what do you guys think, should no old match? Should we just try to get Paul to buy Twitter. Yeah, we get do some fundraising. Who can help with that? Yeah, I trust you in charge, Paul. Let's do that, I think Yeah, I think Paul is the right guy for the job. But we want to hear what you think, folks about the Twitter files, about the nature of a public versus a private platform. Was La Musk right to release this? Was this overhyped? Was this the smoking gun of the conspiracy that a lot of media ignores? Send us your thoughts. Oh gosh, you can find us on Twitter and all sorts of internet places. Yeah, hit us up on Twitter. We are at conspiracy stuff. Ben has one too, He's got one. You can find him directly. You can also find us. Yeah, like you guys should see how whimsical Matt is about this. You can also find us on Instagram, TikTok YouTube, here's where it gets crazy on Facebook. And if none of that quite bags your badgers, fear not. You can also give us a telephone call. That's all right. One s T D W y T K is the number to call. Leave a message at the sound of Ben's dulcet towns. Three minutes is the time you shall have to deliver your missive if you need more time than that, there's another way to get in touch with us. It's the good old fashioned way with an email. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. 
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