The New Information Security Order
How mainstream media's neurotic response to the Twitter Files proves the point about manipulation of public discourse
Since December we’ve been treated to a remarkable exposé of US government agencies’ secret intervention with the management of social media platform Twitter to suppress stories and limit the reach of users in an effort to manipulate and control public discourse. The revelations were made possible after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October, then invited several independent writers to review internal emails and break the news of what they found on the app itself.
The lead journalist on the case has been
, a former reporter at Rolling Stone who has carved a niche for himself on Substack as someone who has escaped the grip of corporate media and its imperatives of narrative control. Taibbi was immediately attacked by peers in mainstream outlets, who on the same night Taibbi first published his findings memorably responded on Twitter by levelling the same accusation in bot-like unison that he had sold his soul to do the work of “the world’s richest man”.The orchestrated if quickly improvised reaction reflected a kneejerk antipathy to any news story that puts Democrats in a bad light and works to the benefit of Trump Republicans — which the Files have done in general since the trend of government interference as revealed so far was to help liberal political causes. Recently, Taibbi showed that this involved allowing hundreds of political commentators, satirists and anarchist types from the US, UK and Canada to be smothered on Twitter as purported Russian stooges through an influence operation managed by a neoconservative think tank called Hamilton 68 that provided a host of media outlets with news cues about their supposed disinformation activities. The database was never made public until searches in the Twitter email stash finally turned up their names and the fact that Twitter executives realized the claims against them were fraudulent smears.
Idealized Archives
A more substantive criticism, however, has been the claim that Taibbi and others were not in control of their archive, subject to the whim of Elon Musk over what they were able to see. Taibbi’s response in a recent interview with The Grayzone has been that he was given free access to a trove of internal communications that he had no reason to believe had been vetted in advance and that his findings were based on keyword searches he chose to make himself when sifting through the material at his disposal. The issue came up in a recent discussion between independent journalists Briahna Joy Gray and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald was famously the first reporter to publish the 2013 leaks from National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealing the extent of US domestic spying. But he expressed reservations about the extent of the access given to Twitter Files reporters and the possible intention behind that.
The concern is that the reporters cannot ultimately know if they are being provided with the material Musk or someone else in Twitter wants them to see, while keeping off bounds that which they prefer to stay under wraps. So it could be that there is still information lurking in the email archive revealing suppression of the Bernie Sanders electoral campaigns, but the searches just haven’t turned it up yet, or it’s concealed in material that’s been deliberately withheld. The possibilities of further revelations changing the narrative were shown last week during a US Congressional committee hearing when a former Twitter employee said the Trump White House had demanded in 2019 that a tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen be taken down for insulting Trump — a nugget that piqued the sudden interest of mainstream media because it showed Trump Republicans harassing Big Tech rather than a liberal consensus deep state.
The broader point that I would make is that 1. any researcher’s approach to an archive is subjective and in that sense partial, and 2. no archive is enough, no archival search is ever complete. Academics rarely have the chance to go through the entirety of an archive, and even if they do, there is always something more you can think of that you wish you could access. It is rare for a journalist to find themselves with an archive such as the WikiLeaks documents that were provided as a mass info dump. But even in that case, if we’re talking about the entirety of material that reveals government policy, motivations and actions, there will always be documents elsewhere that could add more detail, and it’s hardly as if WikiLeaks had access to all government communications with embassies around the world, only a portion. So Taibbi et al. absolutely did the right thing in agreeing to go over what material was provided, even if initial judgements that government agencies were more focused on suppressing Trump Republicans — the result that Musk clearly expected to see — turn out to be less than the whole story. Musk should open the Twitter archive to all researchers.
Narrative Over News
Most of the arguments dismissing the Twitter Files as a nothing burger are, however, being made in anything but good faith. It was especially unfortunate to see a once courageous journalist like Mehdi Hasan, who often held officials’ feet to the fire as an interviewer with Al Jazeera English, dissolve into silly talking points in his reaction to the story, though frankly that’s been his role ever since he was sucked into US mainstream media. If anyone’s working for a billionaire it’s the guy who presents a nightly show on a division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. More importantly, as a journalist you take whatever news you have from a source, then put it out there to percolate in the information ether as one part of a bigger picture. You’re not solving the world in every story written, just moving knowledge forward one piece at a time. Further, the ideal is that you put news out there and let the chips fall where they may in terms of who makes political capital out of it.
This brings us to the tricky issue of framing. News outlets decide what they broadly consider to be running stories, which involves implicitly a specific perspective on them. When I was a correspondent for Reuters in Saudi Arabia “women” was such a story — their attire, their freedom of movement, their representation in institutional, family and other power structures, etc. This was a Western framing emerging from a deep discourse of incomplete modernity “in the birthplace of Islam”, channelled through editors in New York and London into questions of women’s rights in a particular location to the exclusion of others (social media coverage of “gang rape” (apologies: I hate that phrase) forced Indian women onto the same vintage agenda). As an individual journalist in a major media organization, it’s virtually impossible to resist this structuring of knowledge. Another good example is the Bahraini uprising of 2011 — try as you might to avoid describing the protesters as acting from a place of sectarian Shia bias, your editor would inevitably write it in, though your name’s of course on the story. Sometimes media will be more invested in the narrative itself than the principle of free relaying of information about events. Veterans of bureaus in Israel, for example, often come across as censors and framers first and foremost, and I know that the experience of reporters who try to challenge them is always unpleasant.
This is what we’ve seen since Trump and Brexit changed politics forever, with the alarming turn towards judging newsworthiness according to which political side comes out looking good or bad. The point was stated explicitly in a seminal New York Times story in August 2016 that suggested it was time to bend the rules of balance and fairness when it comes to reporting on a disruptive figure like Donald Trump. Since that clarion call, US media in particular has never looked back, and the rationale for belittling the revelations of covert interference in the new public sphere of Twitter is in essence that they impair the proper functioning of an information security architecture that is there for our own good. The extent of collusion between state agencies and media has reached alarming proportions — just look at the number of ex-spooks now wheeled out on outlets like CNN and MSNBC on a regular basis and the direct line intel operatives have to journalists as unnamed sources for stories that rarely go questioned by the outlets that publish them. It wasn’t for nothing that the FBI branded Taibbi and fellow Twitter Files alumnae Lee Fang and Michael Shellenberger as “conspiracy theorists” for daring to expose their shenanigans.
Five Pryin’ Eyes?
There’s almost certainly more to come on the Twitter Files and it may well transpire that US government agencies were targeting more than just Trumpworld and the new American Right. What I wonder is, what manipulation might have been taking place outside the United States, beyond embroilment in the Hamilton 68 scam? We know that US intelligence agencies work closely with their UK counterparts — after all, they were all in on assassinating Julian Assange — and the old Angloid imperial club cooperates globally through an arrangement they call the Five Eyes. Did any of the non-US members take up an opportunity presented to influence Twitter too? It would be no surprise to discover that voices associated with the Jeremy Corbyn Left were being smothered in the UK , but the historical record is in need of more evidence.