The Twitter Files are a wake-up call to protect freedom of speech

Half the room is jumping up and down, screaming, "Gotcha!". The other half shrugs its shoulders, muttering, "So what's new?". Welcome to the war over the so-called Twitter Files.

- Kenan Malik

Over the past month, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, has made internal documents and conversations that took place before his takeover available to a handpicked group of journalists. The files are mainly discussions about who and what should be moderated or banned, ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to the question of whether to remove Donald Trump from the platform. The journalists have released this information through a drip feed of Twitter threads.

For some, the Twitter Files are evidence of collusion between tech companies, liberal politicians and the "deep state" to silence conservatives. For others, they constitute little more than a publicity exercise telling us nothing we did not know. I think we should take the Twitter Files seriously, but also look at the discussion with a sceptical eye, given that much of it is framed by the culture wars.

Consider the controversy over "shadow banning". It's a phrase much bandied about in debates about social media, but its meaning is contested. For the curators of the Twitter Files, "shadow banning" means using algorithms to "deamplify" tweets - that is, stop them reaching a wider audience.