Why the Twitter Files are Worse Than You Think

As each new chapter of the Twitter Files exposé emerges, the extraordinary extent of the government takeover of the Twitter platform and other social media outlets keeps growing.

In #TwitterFilesPart14, we learn how the media aided and abetted the Democrats in discrediting an entirely true report on FBI transgressions in spying on the Trump campaign. They also played up a false conspiracy theory: that Russian bots were promoting the story.

For more, see my column on “How the Media Stoked a Democrat Conspiracy Theory.”

Now Republicans control the House of Representatives, and Rep. Jim Jordan and the Judiciary Committee are preparing to launch an investigation of the Twitter Files and the “weaponization” of the government against the American people.

The panel will probe FBI and CIA efforts to censor Americans’ comments on Twitter and manipulate their feeds to promote the Trump-Russia hoax, bury the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, interfere in the discourse on the 2020 elections, and crush debate on the COVID-19 response.

The overarching theme: were government agencies incorrectly and inappropriately engaging in political manipulation and infringing on fundamental American freedoms by leveraging their ability to regulate, tax, and penalize these private-sector companies?

Officials at the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the State Department, Department of Defense, and more had their hooks into Twitter. They demanded the platform silence thousands of accounts, stop followers from seeing other people’s tweets, and manipulate the flow of information and ideas among the American people.

This violates the First Amendment ban on government’s imposing a prior restraint on free speech. “The First Amendment protects not only speakers but also consumers, listeners and viewers,” Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld writes in a recent op ed in The Wall Street Journal, adding, “when speakers are muzzled, their intended audience suffers a First Amendment violation too.” (WSJ subscribers can read it here).

Some veteran Washington observers are stunned by the scale and sweep of the government’s infiltration. “It’s remarkable to me, I’ve never seen anything like it, and the depth and the extent of it is what’s so scary to me,” says Kimberly Strassel, the Potomac Watch columnist of the Journal since 2005.

In 2017 she published a book called “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.” Never did she suspect that “social media would be coerced or team up with government to actually censor entire areas of speech,” she says.

Jim Jordan is “quite an experienced investigator,” she says, and she hopes Republicans are serious about searching for real reforms rather than digging for dirt for the 2024 election. One good indicator: the Judiciary Committee is running the investigation, which means the panel can propose legislation to fix “whatever they find,” Strassel explains.

A special select committee, like the Jan. 6 panel, lacks the legal authority to draft legislation, as she tells me on the podcast "What's Bugging Me."

The media are ignoring the Twitter Files, one of the biggest scandals of our lifetime. By contrast, Newsmax is one of the few media outlets covering this story: see my view that we aren’t outraged enough by this scandal, which was a massive PSYOP by the FBI. On “Wake Up America,” I said no president ever should be banned from Twitter.

Another Newsmax column advised Elon Musk to make Twitter a nonprofit and move it out of California. My articles elsewhere showed how hundreds of websites all told the same "little lie"; how the media are ignoring this scandal; and trying to undermine it; and playing down censorship of COVID-19 content by both the Trump and Biden administrations.

We also explored why Twitter leaders failed to Just Say No. This is more coverage of the Twitter Files than the New York Times and Washington Post have provided, combined. Search “Twitter Files” on their websites, and you find almost nothing: WashPost, NYT.

Kim Strassel invokes a point made by the one Democrat to push back against Twitter’s ban on President Trump, Rep. Ro Khanna of California: At no time did anyone at Twitter spend “any conceivable time with a team of lawyers, coming up with a concrete notion of free speech and how they would handle that on their platform.”

“We live in a country that has great jurisprudence, 200-plus years of some of the smartest people in the world, talking about free speech and where the lines are, and there didn’t even seem to be a discussion inside Twitter or Facebook,” Strassel says. “Instead they just looked at DHS and said, ‘Tell us what you want us to do.’”