Twitter and Ida Tarbell

[AussieMick]

An article in The Australian was headlined "Ida Tarbell would have been all the Twitter files "

I have posted this because of the reference to Ida ... I think the writer has something important to say, but whether he's right or wrong ... I dont know.

"Another week, another dump of internal Twitter documents that go almost unremarked by much of the US media.

Shedding light on the workings and corruption in powerful corporations was once the bread and butter of American journalism, when brave writers such as Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair in the early 20th century exposed damage caused by Standard Oil and the meat-packing barons, respectively, paving the way for reforms. But the flag-bearers of America’s well-resourced media of the 21st century largely have ignored the release of Twitter’s fascinating internal documents courtesy of the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.

Major TV networks NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN have devoted a grand total of 14 minutes to the topic since last week, according to an analysis by Fox. Fox News, to its credit, has covered the developments extensively.


One of the most powerful social media companies in the world, Twitter seemingly had lied about the extent to which it was censoring speech it didn’t like, sometimes contrary to its own guidelines, and potentially colluding with government agencies to stifle dissent.

The first instalment of the files, which I covered last week in this column, raised the worrying possibility, as yet unproven, that the FBI was knowingly working to shut down coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which clearly revealed potential corruption in the Biden family, censoring the New York Post’s scoop published a few weeks before the 2020 election, despite knowing full well it was legitimate.

Subsequent instalments are equally newsworthy, revealing the social media giant had muffled conservative journalists with millions of followers on Twitter, such as Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino, without their knowledge. It also stifled doctors who spoke out against lock­downs and compulsory vaccina­tion, including Stanford professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya, who was placed on a “trends blacklist” that prevented his views from being widely disseminated on the platform. Not that it should matter for a platform that once promised “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers”, but his arguments turned out to be wholly correct.

Twitter files dump reveals disturbing tale of censorship | Musk happy for Twitter staff to sleep on the job | Twitter dumps Covid misinformation policy
What’s more, former Twitter boss and founder Jack Dorsey testified under oath to congress in 2018 that his company never shadow-banned or censored conservative users.

Further documents in the (thus far) five-part Twitter Files reveal that former president Don­ald Trump was banned arbitrarily by Twitter on January 8 last year, two days after the Capitol riots, after Twitter staff couldn’t determine that he had broken the platform’s terms of service that prevent “incitement of violence”.

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” Trump tweeted on January 8 last year. “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” he added a little later.

The Orwellian-sounding safety department concluded there was no violation of Twitter’s policies: “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” one senior Twitter staffer wrote. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” another wrote. “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday,” said a third.

In 2018, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was able to tweet: “Israel is a malignant cancerous tumour in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.” And in October 2020 former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed tweeted that Muslims had a right “to kill millions of French people”. His account remained; it wasn’t incitement apparently.

None of that mattered; Trump was banned anyway because of political pressure from Twitter’s far-left staff and encouragement from grandees in the Democratic Party. Of course, none of this was illegal, and the US government was probably not involved. But the same can be said of Standard Oil’s behaviour in an earlier era, or the US car industry’s when then journalist-author Ralph Nader exposed their unsafe practices in the 1960s.

The journalists Musk has chosen to present the Twitter Files are highly regarded centrists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, each of whom has endured excoriating attacks for “doing PR for the world’s richest man”. They simply accepted a brief to expose the inner workings of one of the world’s most powerful companies, something journalists of a left-wing persuasion used to seek out.

The fact so many left-wing journalists prefer to turn a blind eye to Twitter’s inner workings speaks volumes about how much the left has changed over the decades – far more comfortable with corporate and government authority when it’s on their side.

The Twitter Files have further to run. Musk was criticised last weekend for one of his typically playful tweets, urging Anthony Fauci, the US’s outgoing Covid-19 tsar, to be prosecuted for alleged lies about the origin of Covid and its funding genesis.

“Maybe because I am from China,” an unnamed lone Twitter employee wrote on January 7 last year in internal discussion over Trump’s imminent ban. “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”

Self-evidently, my employer is a laudable exception, but much of the establishment media appears to quite like the Chinese Communist Party governance model.

ADAM CREIGHTON WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT


I think you can only access it if you're a subscriber ... but its also referred to here (which might be accessible)

https://twitter.com/Adam_Creighton/statu...2168598529

[Rob Wick]

Mike,

Given that I find Twitter to be a cesspool unworthy of my time, I won't comment on the article's point. I do have to admit to some confusion about the headline, but I'm assuming that it means Tarbell and Sinclair would have been very interested in the Twitter files.

Given that Tarbell would ask "what's Twitter?" I think it is presumptuous of the headline writer to assume that she would be "all over" the files. It's like when Don Fehrenbacher was asked what Lincoln would say about busing. "The first thing he would say is, what's a bus?"

Tarbell's international fame rests on her investigation of Rockefeller, but her reasoning for doing it wasn't what one might think. Tarbell was never out to reform the world. She simply wanted to make it so other people had the right to profit as Rockefeller did by using legal means rather than extralegal ones. In fact, Tarbell often found herself on the other side of business practices question when she wrote fawning biographies of GE's chairman Owen D. Young and US Steel's chairman Elbert Gary. Tarbell did not write what she did in an attempt to change the world. She did it in order to help change a specific situation. Whether Tarbell would have found the Twitter issue worth her time is impossible to tell with any authority. However, I would doubt it.

Best
Rob