Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000140 · Politics & Movements → Content moderation controversies → Twitter Files document releases · 2022–2023
Twitter Files
Musk releases Twitter's moderation records to prove bias claims
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“The evidence that Twitter censored people was published as a Twitter thread.”
Why Noah kept it
In December 2022 Elon Musk gave internal Twitter documents to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who posted them as threads on Twitter itself. Each side read them as proof of what it already thought. Nothing in the Ark covers the fight over content moderation, so it goes in.
- In the Ark since
- 27 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.9 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 103.3 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
What it is
In December 2022, Elon Musk gave internal Twitter documents to journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who published them as Twitter threads. The documents showed the company's decisions on what content to remove and which accounts to suspend. Conservatives argued the files proved Twitter had censored them unfairly; fact-checkers and former employees said the documents showed normal moderation work and that Republicans had also made takedown requests.
Why it’s internet culture
The Files became a flashpoint in a long argument about whether social media platforms suppress particular political views. People used the documents to support whatever side they already believed, showing how hard it is to settle platform bias claims with evidence when people disagree on what fairness means.
A new owner released a platform's internal moderation emails as Twitter threads. Users on both sides read the same screenshots as proof of what they already believed about censorship online.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2022 · Twitter, in threads by Matt Taibbi and others using documents from Elon Musk · Also known as #TwitterFiles; The Twitter Files
- What it is
- The Twitter Files were internal documents from Twitter, a website where people posted short public messages. After Elon Musk bought the company in 2022, he gave staff emails, chat logs and screenshots of internal tools to a few chosen writers. They published them in numbered instalments as long chains of posts on Twitter itself. Each instalment claimed to show how the old management decided which posts and accounts to hide, limit or remove, which was called content moderation.
- Where it came from
- Musk bought Twitter on 27 October 2022 and promised to show "what really happened" under the previous bosses. On 2 December 2022 the journalist Matt Taibbi posted the first instalment, about Twitter blocking links in October 2020 to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. Bari Weiss followed with one on limits placed on certain accounts without telling them. Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, David Zweig and others added more parts until March 2023, covering Donald Trump's ban, contact with the FBI, posts about Covid and US military propaganda accounts that Twitter had let run.
- Why it mattered
- For years people had suspected websites of hiding their posts without telling them, which they called shadow banning, and the companies had mostly said little about how it worked. The Files put screenshots of the actual tools in public. They led to a US House of Representatives hearing in March 2023 where Taibbi and Shellenberger testified, and they shaped how both sides argued about online censorship afterwards. They also showed a new owner using a company's own records against its old management, published on the same site.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- The same screenshots convinced each side of what it already believed. People treated leaked internal documents as a scoreboard and cared more about who'd been proved right than about how moderation actually worked.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.5 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (38.4 KB)
- Original
- 103.3 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.9 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.4 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.5 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 12.5% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,454 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,067 |
History
Kept
“In December 2022 Elon Musk gave internal Twitter documents to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who posted them as threads on Twitter itself. Each side read them as proof of what it already thought. Nothing in the Ark covers the fight over content moderation, so it goes in.”