@DetroitDan I think it’s fair to say that state and security-state adjacent actors were “in the room” and made their pitch to Twitter, and you can dislike that. But I don’t think any fair read of what Taibbi et al unearthed could fail to note how extraordinarily independent pre-Musk Twitter was in responding to that. Mostly, they called bullshit and refused to censor. 1/

@DetroitDan The big conservative outrages — the Hunter laptop, banning Trump — may have been mistakes, but they were Twitter’s mistakes. Yes, the Hunter laptop choice was “informed” by alerts to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation, and in your view that was entirely bullshit. But the Twitter team wasn’t under state pressure, they fucked up on their own because they thought they were doing the right thing. 2/

@DetroitDan Obviously what’s “right” says something about their own ideology and worldview. I think you can make a strong case that Twitter’s misinformation policy reflected basically a professional liberal, mainstream professional class worldview (esp re COVID), and they made consequential distribution-shaping choices (from deamplifcation to takedowns) based on that. 3/

@DetroitDan But I don’t think you can fairly make the case that they just did what the US security state instructed, at least on the censorship side. They had a strong culture of resisting state censorship demands, from US and foreign government sources. (There is evidence I think they capitulated to US security state demands *not* to censor accounts they otherwise might have flagged as inauthentic, an interesting kind of case!) 4/

@DetroitDan Musk’s Twitter has flouted the establishment liberal worldview of prior Twitter on things like COVID and hate speech, so may seem refreshing to people who felt suppressed before. But on questions of state-directed censorship, Musk’s Twitter is unambiguous worse. He lets Modi’s government ban tweets globally, something prior Twitter never did. 5/

@DetroitDan I’m sure Musk’s Twitter doesn’t capitulate to any US security state requests, because he knows they are toothless, unlike India, which might block Twitter if he offends them. For all that is wrong with the US, you can publicly give the security state the finger (as long as it is not by exfiltrating classified documents), and nothing bad will happen to you. In a personal sense, as a writer, I am much more worried about Ron DeSantis than the CIA. /fin