New Tsars like the Old Tsars
The "Twitter Files" - Landmark Moment in the Annals of Speech.
Censorship is the tool people in power use to suppress ideas that challenge their power.1
“The Twitter Files”
The “Twitter Files” is an ongoing series of reports released on Twitter2 about content moderation3 on Twitter prior to its purchase by Elon Musk4 that resulted in censorship. The first 4 in the series were by Matt Taibbi,5 Bari Weiss6 and Michael Shellenberger.7 The initial report focused on suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop story by Twitter staff.8 Later reports included the removal of Donald Trump from Twitter.
"Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech."—Matt Taibbi, “The Twitter Files” at Twitter, December 9, 2022. Tweet #5.
Censorship began as soon as people began to write things down whether on clay tablets, parchment, printed books or social media.9 The foundational polemic against censorship was by John Milton.
John Milton and Free Speech
In 1644 John Milton, English poet, wrote the Areopagitica10 opposing licensing and censorship.11 A recent assessment of Milton stated:
" Milton's compelling images of administrative arrogance, corruption, and mindless rigidity should always be part of the equation as each new threat or outrage generates well-meaning proposals for limited, carefully confined restrictions on speech.12
Tsar Nicholas I of Russia and the Third Section of Secret Police
In 1847 the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. On April 23, 1849, he and other members of the Circle were arrested.13 Dostoyevsky was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia and indefinite military service.
Surveillance of Dostoyevsky was carried out by the secret police of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. It was called the Third Section. In addition to monitoring actions and oral speech, the Third Section played an important role in censorship of printed works. Ministry censors were instructed to inform the Third Section of authors who violated the regulations. However, rather than wait to surveil only authors who had violated the censorship regulations, Third Section agents preferred to surveil certain authors and then, once suspicious activity was spotted, reject that author's material even if it had passed the censors.14
Global Trust & Security at Twitter
As the "Twitter Files" have been released and analyzed by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and others (December 2-10, 2022) the extent of censorship and blacklisting of contributors to Twitter has been made transparent. Yoel Roth, Head of Global Trust & Security at Twitter,15 led a small group of executives who used tools and policies to censor voices that they judged should not be heard.16
Congressman (D) Ro Khanna has stated, “Twitter’s Duty to Protect Free Speech Censorship of the Hunter Biden story might have helped my party, but it was bad for our democracy.”17
This is an ongoing story. More “Twitter Files” will be released.18
Darnton, Robert. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York : W.W. Norton 2014.
Goldstein, Robert Justin. 2000. The war for the public mind political censorship in nineteenth-century Europe. Westport, Conn: Praeger.
Knox, Emily J. M. (2015). Book Banning in 21st-Century America. 2015.Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield.
Knuth, Rebecca. Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2008.
Ovenden, Richard [VNV]. Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack. 2020.
Siebert, Frederick S. Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952.
Twitter, Inc. is an American social media company based in San Francisco, California. The company operates the microblogging and social networking service Twitter. Wikipedia.
Amplification of Tweets was characterized as “Visibility Filtering” by Twitter executives according to documents released in the Twitter Files.
Sheila Dang, Greg Roumeliotis. Musk begins his Twitter ownership with firings, declares the 'bird is freed' Reuters, Business News. October 27, 2022.
Matt Taibbi, December 2, 2022. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Introduction to the series on Twitter.
Matt Taibbi, December 9, 2022. THREAD: The Twitter Files: THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP Part One: October 2020-January 6th on Twitter.
Bari Weiss, December 8, 2022. THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS on Twitter.
Michael Shellenberger, December 10, 2022. TWITTER FILES, PART 4 The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7 on Twitter.
Fung, Brian (December 3, 2022). "Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story | CNN Business".
McCook, Kathleen. Substack on preservation and annihilation of books, ideas, and free expression: Ebla to E-Books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory.
McCook, Kathleen. “What does John Milton (1644) suggest about deplatforming on Facebook and Twitter?” May 24, 2021, on Substack, Ebla to E-Books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory.
Blasi, Vincent. 2018. “A Reader’s Guide to John Milton’s Areopagitica, the Foundational Essay of the First Amendment Tradition.” Supreme Court Review 2017 (1): 273–312. (Blasi is Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School).
Dostoyevsky spent eight months in prison until, on December 22, 1847 the prisoners were led without warning to the Semyonovsky Square where sentence of death by firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three prisoners were led out to be shot first. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered and a messenger arrived with the information that the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment.
Monas, Sidney. The Third Section; Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I. Harvard University Press, 1961.
Twitter Files: Matt Taibbi, December 2, 2022. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Introduction to the series on Twitter; Bari Weiss, December 8, 2022. THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS on Twitter. Matt Taibbi, December 9, 2022. THREAD: The Twitter Files: THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP Part One: October 2020-January 6th on Twitter; Michael Shellenberger, December 10, 2022. TWITTER FILES, PART 4 The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7 on Twitter.
Ro Khanna, Twitter’s Duty to Protect Free Speech: Censorship of the Hunter Biden story might have helped my party, but it was bad for our democracy. Wall Street Journal (December 5, 2022).
Matt Taibbi. (December 10, 2022). “What’s in The Twitter Files, Part 3" TK News by Matt Taibbi. TK News by Matt Taibbi is published on the Substack platform.
This is an important story. I'm glad you are keeping us informed about it.
Yours is the voice I've been awaiting on this subject. You are spot on and bring a historical perspective few others can. Possibly your most i8mportant post ever.