So far, the media largely isn’t taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn’t just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. But while the “Facebook Files” took months to contextualize and fact-check, Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. Ultimately, both social media releases are attempts at shaping the mainstream media narratives about the purpose and practice of content moderation on massively large open platforms. To pretend that the “Twitter Files” illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated. In fact, what the “Twitter Files” reveal is what we already knew about social media governance from the “Facebook Files”: Social media corporations spend a large amount of time and resources discussing how to bend the rules so that politicians and celebrity influencers don’t get suspended. One of them, Yoel Roth, has fled his home amid death threats. In the crosshairs, quite literally, are a handful of former employees tasked with “Trust and Safety,” tech speak for brand management. Instead, they serve the purpose of demonizing Twitter’s former content moderation executives to make it seem like they were prioritizing the moderation of political disinformation above child exploitation. Tweets laced with allegations that former Twitter executives purposefully stopped aggressive moderation of child exploitation often subsume the Twitter replies, but the details of the “Twitter Files” do not seem to hold new revelations. On the other hand, the “Twitter Files” are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies. The “Facebook Files” helped drive a new narrative about how the social media company handled (or failed to handle) content moderation issues and fueled incitement across the globe. Haugen’s ultimate goal was to blow the whistle on Facebook’s inability to reckon with the damage caused by its own product, and she largely succeeded.
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