Despite a few posts involving Twitter (now “X”) over the last few years, plus making a specific “library” post about the Twitter Files, I haven’t done a summary of their censorship pre-Musk sufficiently and I should have considering how big a story it is, plus the difference that Musk’s ownership may make to the 2024 US election, as well it being directly related to cases that have been before the Supreme Court of the USA with regard to 1st Amendment issues around free speech and censorship, although that will be a separate post.

Suffice to say that the MSM have almost completely ignored those investigative reports, but that just demonstrates how increasingly out of touch they are with the public and how they’re being left behind by Internet news sources like X-Twitter, Facebook, Substack and others.

Musk’s purchase of the company in 2022 had already caused meltdowns on the left, as you can see in this article listing the likes of Islamist (and fired MSNBC host) Mehdi Hassan and George Takei (Star Trek’s Sulu) howling and screaming about how they could now see Right-Wing tweets in their feeds (the horror, the horror). But he also opened up the guts of the old corporation to examination by journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss and others. They themselves described what this involved:

“I’m not going to spend $44 billion to reinstate a satire blog,” Musk said about the Babylon Bee, which had been banned from Twitter in March 2022. “I did it because I was worried about the future of civilization,” he told us late one night. 
…
He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out. 

Sounds like you could dump him into a meeting of the Founding Fathers and he’d fit right in. But whereas they had to deal with a population that was 33% for the British cause and 33% uncaring, Musk had to deal with an SF workforce that was between 97 and 99 percent Democrat. 

If all you want is a good quick summary of what they found then this article by The Fire is good:

Twitter’s “trust and safety” team was far from an objective referee of the company’s stated rules. Instead, Twitter relied on politics, prejudice, and cronyism in how it would treat both fact and opinion, with the shadow of federal law enforcement looming nearby.
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Take the practice of shadowbanning….those following users like conservative activist Charlie Kirk or Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would be far less likely to see their updates, if they saw them at all. Talk show host Dan Bongino’s tweets were even removed from users’ searches.

The story of the general black lists can be found in the Twitter Files 2 (TF 2) but is well summarised in the articles, Twitter’s Secret Blacklists

What is perfectly clear today is that the platform is an indispensable tool for journalists and politicians and that it has deeply affected which stories get covered and how. It has the power to determine the heroes and villains of contemporary news cycles, and to decide which areas of inquiry are legitimate and which are strictly off-limits—even wrong.
…
So the fact that Twitter shielded users from perspectives it deemed extremist—and that it did so while pretending it wasn’t—is a fact relevant to all Americans, whether they have ever logged onto Twitter or not. Tweets or accounts or hashtags that offended the powers that be were not publicly shamed, but quietly throttled, meaning users frequently did not know they were being deprived of arguments or data that did not support the prevailing wisdom or the politically favored narrative.

For years, Twitter denied that it did this.

And to be fair it wasn’t just the Right Wing that began to suspect this:

Congressman Ro Khanna, a California Democrat whose district encompasses much of Silicon Valley, told The Free Press: “The problem that’s happening here is that people are conflating hate speech with viewpoint discrimination.”

He added: “The essence of this story is that Twitter is telling some people that, based on the viewpoints that they have, that they aren’t allowed to ask a question or share their point of view in the same way as everyone else in the room. And that’s just anti-democratic.”

The ultimate ban was President Trump of course, and Twitter Files 3 (TF 3) covered that, summarised in this article, Why Twitter Really Banned Trump:

Twitter ostensibly kicked Trump off because of two tweets he fired off that morning [Jan 6]. But on the day he was banned, executives and lower-level employees alike privately admitted that neither of the president’s tweets violated the platform’s rules. 
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Given Trump’s “fight like hell” comment at the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, even some federal judges have debated whether those comments were “arguable incitement” to violence. Trump did not make that “fight like hell” comment on Twitter.

The team specifically charged with reviewing Trump’s two Tweets were adamant that they didn’t breach Twitter policy:

“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer with respect to Trump’s first tweet. “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.” Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.” 

But by the afternoon of January 6 it was clear that there was a full-scale revolt against these arguments among Twitter employees and it was they who were driving this, so a new angle was dreamed up, that the term “American patriots” might be interpreted as “coded incitement to further violence”, and that sealed the deal. Trump’s account was banned by the end of the day.

The funny thing is that other Western leaders who were no friends of Trump were disturbed by all this – not because of the censorship but that it had been done by the private sector, and that perhaps they’d be next. The article makes it clear that was not going to be an issue, listing the likes of obviously violence-inciting statements placed on Twitter by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamed, and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, all of whose accounts remained active.

Which is as it should be, as The Fire article argued in the case of yet another leader:

When Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed literally called for people to take up arms against a region of his own country, Twitter purposely kept his tweet accessible, and for good reason: People should know what world leaders are saying.

And of course when it came to speech their staff approved of the old Twitter was doing the opposite of shadow-banning and outright banning:

Twitter deployed its users as unknowing cat’s paws to promote the company’s own message through amplifying tweets and users with whom it agreed and throttling those it disfavored. Was someone’s tweet actually popular, or was it just Twitter’s heavy thumb on the scale? 

Partisans of the old Twitter regime frequently reminded dissenters that it is a private company and can do what it wants. With mocking glee, partisans of Twitter 2.0 now say the same.

Wah! 😂

Also this one which gets to the heart of the problem, The Twitter Files Remind Us The Deep State Lives:

At the time the establishment denied that there was any such thing as the Deep State. Nothing to see here—just patriotic civil servants doing their duty! Yet then, in November 2021, after Trump was safely gone from office, they fessed up; one Beltway establishmentarian published a book entitled—you guessed it!—American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation. The book received admiring notices from—you guessed this one, too!—National Public Radio. Obviously, as they emerged from the gloom of Trump to the bright light of Biden, Deep Statists were happy to shift, from denying the plainly obvious to basking in liberal applause. 
…
Yet as Taibbi documents, the Deep State is more than just lifer-bureaucrats in the Federal Triangle. It also includes sympathetic techsters, easily enlisted in the Deep State doings. And here, providing granular detail, the Twitter Files are invaluable. Another Twitter File scribe, Michael Shellenberger,  notes that the FBI was so eager to get the company in on its game that it extended Top Secret security clearances to Twitter employees. Did you know that the FBI could do that? Indeed, the FBI gave Twitter $3.4 million to help with the suppressing, filtering, shadow-banning, and deplatforming. Did you know the FBI could do that?

I have to wonder if any of “that” was even legal?

For the details on the Twitter files I’ve updated the post The Twitter Files Library.