The Dispatch Podcast - The Twitter Files Explained w/ Kmele Foster

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Elon Musk opened up the secret Twitter vaults before a select group of journalists who went on to chain-tweet their findings. David French sits down with Kmele Foster, co-host of The Fifth Column podcast, to figure out whether the response to the findings should be a vociferous freak out, a tired shrug, or something more nuanced. They discuss political censorship, media spins, and Big Tech. Show Notes: -David French: Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don't Understand the First Amendment - Kmele Foster, We The Fifth   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm David French on my last full day of dispatch podcasting and dispatch work before I move over to the New York Times. So for my last full day of podcasting, now, the Advisory Opinions podcast is still going to continue, but for my last full day of podcasting, I couldn't think of a better person to talk to than my friend Camille Foster. Camille, where do I, where do I begin with you? One of the leading voices of reason on Twitter, is that a good, is that a good bio line? Yeah, I hope so.

We, co-host of We the Fifth podcast, which I've had. honor of being on a couple of times and just general all around just general all around friend of liberty and so I like that I Camille and I have been in a kind of a online foxhole together before and we'll get into that but the main reason I've brought Camille here is we're going to talk about the Twitter files and a bit about the Facebook files which is a much sort of smaller category of the conversation, not in consequence, but in kind of the conversation. So we want to talk about free speech online. And I want to get Camille's take on what he thinks about the Twitter files. I've been very curious about his sort of holistic take

on this. As I said, he's always been to me one of the more reasonable and proportionate voices. on Twitter. You recognize when small things are small things and when big things are big things, and that's a gift. So we're going to drill down into all of that. But before we do, I want to talk a bit about our shared experience in the online foxhole. Camille and I, along with Thomas Chatterton Williams and Jason Stanley, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, cautioning against these anti-CRT bills that had been proposed and passed in many state legislatures on a couple of grounds. One was, just as a general matter, it is not a good practice to oppose ideas by banning ideas.

And that was sort of the general, sort of the general thesis statement. And then a secondary look at sort of the precise details of many of these bills, they were poorly written, overbroad, very vague, left, left. people with very little guidance as to how to regulate their speech. And we, how would it be fair to characterize the blowback we got? A number of people weren't very happy. I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest that the criticism was generally proportionate or fair to use some of the words that you employed a little earlier when describing me. There were certainly some people who kind of responsibly and politely disagreed, but there were plenty of other people who insisted

that to take a position that suggested that some of these CRT bans might not be a good idea was essentially to capitulate to indicate that you, whether explicitly or not, de facto or de jury, support the worst kind of propaganda being pushed into public schools, which It's just not a fair reading of the thing that we put together. I think the actual opening and concluding bits of the piece weren't even about the CRT bills. They were asking and trying to answer this important question that should be fundamental to any conversation about public education. What is the purpose of a public education and a free society? And I think that we all concluded together that it ought to be about fostering critical thinking and doing so in an environment.

that doesn't include this kind of ideological indoctrination and that to the extent we find bad things happening, we should avail ourselves of the mechanisms that are there. But as you explained, trying to ban particular disfavored ideas or ideologies is just a bad idea. And I think we've largely been proven right on that point. Yeah, let's drill down on that for a minute because I was going to ask you, it's been about 18 months or so since that was published. how do you feel about our position 18 months later yeah i feel really good about it i mean i think

there there were a couple of core claims i mean one was that to the extent one is concerned about the kind of weird cultural shifts that have been taking place and i think it's it's worthwhile to point those things out they haven't really abated in a lot of the places where these laws have been passed you've certainly seen some flashy things where a teacher gets fired for something that may or may not seem offensive or there's some weird recording of teachers talking in private. Can we talk about the Holocaust? And if we do, do we have to present the other quote unquote other side of the Holocaust? Like that sort of thing is frustrating. It's frustrating to see that happen. But it hardly suggests that,

you know, the particular problem that they were trying to address is actually been corrected. In fact, the fact is that you've seen in certain places like Florida where you got the CRT bands and then they followed it up with some subsequent regulation, the Stop Woke Act, which took action in public schools, K through 12, universities, and even put specific regulations on what private employers could do. So it was a step beyond. But you still hear complaints from people who are concerned about these things about what's happening in classrooms. And that's because a lot of what happens isn't necessarily in the curriculum. It's sometimes in the presentation of things. But it's also the case that I think a

of these things managed to get adjudicated in different ways. Parents get involved. I think some of the good things that have happened beyond the CRT laws are people have started going to school board meetings. And when they're not these preposterous and hysterical dramas, people are asking good questions. They're getting elected to the school board. They're getting engaged in ways that they were not before. And I think on net that that's a good thing, especially if we can make it a little less overtly political. Well, and one thing that you and I talked about at length and talked about online, talked about in when I've been, you know, guest, I've been a guest on We the Fifth, that to be

opposed to these anti-CRT laws is not to acquiesce to CRT or to say that everything is just fine in public education or that parents should roll over and accept whatever. sort of technocratic educator education experts send their way. We had some pretty concrete proposals for combating some real some actual real problems that exist. And one of those concrete proposals was school choice, backpack funding, let money follow the student. And it's interesting, Camille, I feel like there has been sort of a bifurcation on the right. There are some people who are doubling and tripling down on the anti-CRT style approach, which is the Stop Oak Act, which has been largely enjoined,

or people who are like, now let's go hunting through libraries to find what books we can get rid of. But then there's this whole other group that is saying, hey, school choice seems like a lot more structural, long lasting. Yeah. And there seems to be momentum there that I haven't seen in years past. Yeah. And, you know, I think I mentioned it to you at the time. I've certainly mentioned on the podcast in the past. But when I've talked to someone, of the more prominent activists in the space. And even before this became a national push of theirs, I can remember a couple of months

before we published our piece in the Times having some of these conversations. I talked to them about school choice and insisted over and over again that if we directed our energy towards that, as opposed to prohibitions on the ideas that we dislike, I suspect we could make a tremendous amount of progress. You could focus some of the angst that's out there

that you've been able to cultivate. And they didn't do that. And I think they probably squandered some of the energy that would have been good for that. And certainly, I think, prevented us from being able to actually accumulate some goodwill from people who probably would have been genuinely concerned about these things, but who were persuaded that people just don't want to talk about racism, that they just don't want to talk about slavery, which I think is overwhelmingly untrue when it comes to people who are generally. proponents of the CRT bills, they're concerned about what students are learning, and it's legitimate to have those concerns. The question is whether or not the particular way that they've decided to go about trying to address their concerns are consistent with the Constitution in general and are in principle, because these are different things consistent with the ideals

of sort of free speech and the outcome that they're actually striving for. And it ought to be regarded as a sensible disagreement, but it wasn't always. Yes. Well, you know, I'm very persuaded there's a Supreme Court, a Supreme Court opinion that advisory opinions listeners have heard me talk about a lot. And that is an opinion born out of the 1970s, very similar. Nothing, there's nothing new under the sun. We have these arguments periodically all the time. And about a sort of a wave of book banning that occurred in the 1970. and one of those cases made it to the Supreme Court of the United States, where the Supreme Court articulated that students do have, in a plurality opinion, but indicated that students do have

a First Amendment protected right to receive information, which was interesting, that wasn't fully fleshed out, very interesting. But the court said something that was really, I thought, quite insightful and persuasive about the purpose of public education, which is to prepare students for participation in an often contentious pluralistic society. And that really, really put an exclamation point to me on the philosophical reason why I'm opposed to bans on ideas. Yeah. Because you're not preparing students for participation in an often contentious pluralistic

society when you're trying to shield them from ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly agree with that. Was that wave of book bannings related to some of the evolution debates? So this was much more sort of anti-American books are perceived to be anti-American books on race, so, you know, on racial controversies. So, you know, in the night, we went through during the 50s, 60s, 70s, especially when the Cold War was sort of hanging over our heads, some sort of existential angst about how we cultivate patriotism, for example,

and love of country. And these are all controversies that still come up today. I mean, one of the most famous court cases in the history of the United States is West Virginia v. Barnett, which is a mandatory pledge of allegiance in public education in World War II. I think we could talk about this forever. And I brought, but I brought you on to talk about the Twitter files. Yeah. So let me do some table setting and then we'll dive in. So a lot of listeners who are on Twitter quite a bit or on social media quite a

bit are like don't table set. I know what the Twitter files are, dive in. But some of you don't really know what they are. And so what the Twitter files are are a series, multiple Twitter threads by journalists releasing internal documents that have been. supplied to them by Twitter that sort of open up at least part, and we'll get to how much really is open, but open up at least part of the internal workings of Twitter during a series of very public controversies over the last five, six, seven years. And that includes what was

Twitter doing and thinking about internally and how are they communicating internally over the Hunter Biden laptop and the short-lived Twitter decision to sort of block access to information about the Hunter Biden laptop. How much did the federal government, including the FBI, interact with Twitter regarding content moderation decisions, both on foreign interference, election integrity, also on things like COVID and alleged COVID misinformation, also internal documents regarding Twitter's decision to suspend Donald Trump. You know, again, opening that up, then there's a kind of a cousin to it called the Facebook files. Our mutual friend Robbie Suave from Reason talked about Facebook's interactions with the federal government over primarily COVID misinformation and limiting access to the platform around COVID, alleged COVID,

misinformation. It's important to say alleged because some things that were deemed in misinformation turned out to be not misinformative. Is that a word? And so I can't, it's hard to summarize them all. We'll, we'll dive into the different buckets. And I think there are different distinct buckets. But my first question for you, Camille, is I was fascinated that the Twitter files were essentially conditionally released. In other words, that we don't know the full universe of documents that Matt Taibi and Barry Weiss and others had access to. But what we do know is that they had to release their reporting and Twitter threats. This was part of the, this was part of the conditions for receiving the access. It would

come out on Twitter. So what was, let's go process and then we'll go substance. What are your thoughts on that process? What that the Twitter thread style release of Twitter files to me has not been talked we people have not talked enough about that process. What was your what were your thoughts as you saw this unfold? Well, I think this was shortly after Elon Musk obviously took control of Twitter and he he was the one who made the decision to look into these things to get to the bottom of the Hunter Biden situation and the specifically and the decision to ban Trump on after January 6th and I think it's rather obvious that Elon wanted to keep some of the action on Twitter to kind of gin up a bit more attention there that it sounds like there was always an expectation

that this would be published in other places as well but the initial release was via these essentially live it was live tweeted and you would kind of be impatiently waiting for the next post to go up, which one might imagine that this had been all been drafted before and then just gets copied and pasted into thread. But especially in the first couple of iterations, it seemed as though Matt, who was the first person to tweet about this, was doing it in real time. It felt like it. I don't know if that's the case, but it felt like it. So that part of it, I think, just made the entire thing in the beginning a little bit more, perhaps a little more interesting, but it also became pretty exhausting by the third time. And you didn't know when

these things were going to release. They would show up on a bunch of different accounts. One couldn't, there was being parodied. So occasionally you would see Twitter files like part 99 on some rando Twitter account, which given the new policy, a number of people had blue check marks now. So it was, it became really difficult to figure out what was happening. So at some point, I had to stop following them in real time and just wait for sort of a compendium to be pulled together as Matt has eventually done of not just his publications, but everyone's. And I think since then, it's been much easier to get a sense of exactly what's there. But I think the initial decision to tweet thread all of these things was generally deleterious. And the fact that it was happening

alongside a lot of hype about what was going to be published. Oftentimes, Elon would tweet, oh, it's happening right now, Twitter files in 20 minutes. I don't think that was terribly helpful either. I do think there were some important things here. I also think there's quite a bit of hyperbole around this. And none of that has generally been helpful for highlighting the important things in my estimation. Right. You know, my main critique would be, I would say, it just made it more difficult to understand and to place in larger context. So when you're writing long-form journalism, which the Twitter files require long-form journalism, this is way too complicated for a tweet thread.

And when you're doing long-form journalism, you can do things like place different kinds of revelations in legal context. In other words, what's the precedent for this kind of behavior? What are the legal standards surrounding this kind of behavior? Instead, you had a lot of a placing of documents into the public domain, which is helpful, which is very helpful, but absent a lot of larger context so that it was very difficult, unless you were kind of steeped in this stuff, right? Unless you really had been kind of living this stuff, it was very difficult to place in context. And so the way in which a lot of this got placed in context was by very brief context in a tweet in the actual thread itself, very brief, or the immediate arguing of the activist class about the Twitter thread. And that's not necessarily the most helpful context either.

So it was just hard to figure out what's going on. And I feel like I've kind of got my hands around it a bit, but I'm still not 100. I'm 100% sure that I have the full context. And again, part of that is the reporting process. You just kind of have to trust reporters that they have of the universe of documents that they have looked through, that they are producing documents that are fairly representative of the assertions that they're making. And so, you know, so some of that you've got a trust process, but longer form discussions help with the trust issue. Yeah, for sure. There was the broad concern raised by a number of reporters who weren't privy to or didn't have access to the information, just insisting, well, Elon, you should just make this all public.

You should publish it all so that more people have access to it. I do think it would have been interesting to see a wider breadth of perspectives brought to bear on some of these things. But I also appreciate the distinct challenge of essentially giving. people access to a ton of internal communications that you're not necessarily able to parse before giving it out. And there may be all sorts of legal liabilities or just general privacy concerns, which weren't completely obviated by them deciding to do things in this particular way, but certainly would have been much worse in a universe where he just says, okay, you know, here's

several terabytes of private correspondence or corporate correspondence. internal correspondence, you know, between Twitter employees and between Twitter employees and members of the government and, you know, the various intelligence agencies or criminal justice organizations, like that could have been a real problem as well. So I can at least appreciate some of the challenges that are just kind of inherent in trying to do something like this and not necessarily smack Elon or anyone else for that. Right. All right. So let's go big picture and then we'll drill down. So what is your overall takeaway to the extent that you have an overall or maybe you have like several sub overall takeaways? What's your overall takeaway from the Twitter files? I think in general, there are a lot of important things here. Apart from the whole thing being broad and sprawling, you know, you can, if you step back and look at what's there, you will really have to squint very hard. to find some sort of de juree censorship on the part of the government so far as I'm concerned. There are, however, I think plenty of things that would satisfy pretty easily my definition

of, like, de facto censorship with respect to government involvement. And again, just because of the way they were just the way that all of this was disseminated, it made it kind of hard to see. But certainly, when I see, you know, senators. who have regular correspondence with Twitter whose offices are telling them, look, these accounts are problematic. These posts are problematic. Why don't you do something about that? When it seems that both Democrats and Republicans kind of had an open line of communication to some of these internal censorship organizations and we're flagging things for them with some regularity.

Again, how appropriate that sort of thing was is a question. These are things which may not rise to the level of being an actual violation of the First Amendment, but which certainly demand scrutiny. And I think perhaps more than anything else, and this, again, is not necessarily a First Amendment issue. It does highlight a lot of the inherent challenges for these huge tech companies, these social media platforms, with respect to how content moderation works, especially when you have these cloistered kind of ideologically monolithic institutions and they have these internal groups who are responsible for figuring out who should be allowed to say what on the platform this becomes a real challenge and the process tends to be pretty opaque so being able to have

a real look at some of these internal communications I think has been pretty revealing And it's revealed more tensions than I even thought were probably there with respect to just the functioning of the criminal justice apparatus and the national security state more broadly. And people are going to have, I think they're going to vary with respect to their perspective on how disconcerting any of this stuff should be. But I think it is very hard to suggest that there shouldn't be greater transparency in general with respect to. to a lot of this conduct. So I think that this is good in that regard. I would love to see some sort of legislation that made it more likely or at least a change and practice on the part of some of these companies to report more regularly on just

what's happening. I don't know that we'll see that, but that's what I would actually like to see come of all of this. I think where I was was this was a mess. It was a mess of Twitter's own making. And a lot of people warned them about it. And the people who warned them were right. And there wasn't anything, there wasn't anything that surprised me in the whole Twitter files.

There was not one thing that surprised me in the whole Twitter files because the idea that the government was interacting with Twitter over COVID, over election interference, everybody knew that was happening. Like this and the, now we might not have known about any given senator's letter or any given representatives letter, but the jawboning of social media was happening. Jawboning is a term, meaning government trying to convince or cajole private entities to act rather than using their actual regulatory authority to force action. All that jawboning was happening in full view of the public. And the fact that there would be also some jawboning in private should not surprise a single individual. But the problem is, in my view, the social media company is essentially what they did. their sort of original sin was two was twofold one was vague and overbroad policies regarding censorship and two a lack of transparency on how they chose to censor or the various means in

which so when you create vague and overbroad policies and then you allow anybody to report on anybody for violating those policies as we know from long history in higher education where they tried speech codes, you've just created a mess because all of a sudden you have this huge categories of speech that are now open to potential banning according to your own policy, but without specific guidance on how to do it or why, and then without specific transparency requirements for me or you to even know if we've been penalized in some circumstances, such just the whole shadow banning concept, and we can get into that. But to me, it felt like, yeah, this is exactly what happens when you create speech codes

that are divorced from First Amendment standards and then invite everybody to comment on whether or not you or I or anyone else should be banned from the platform. And all of that unfolded, to use a term from Star Wars, all is unfolding as we have foreseen. This is what happens. This is what happens. You used the phrase censorship policy a moment ago. Are you referring specifically to the moderation policies of Twitter? The moderation policies, the speech policies, right, right, exactly.

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And then how Twitter interacted with itself regarding the decision to knock Donald Trump off the platform. And I think you and I are probably going to agree strongly that Twitter should not have limited the reach of the original New York Post story. And we might disagree about Twitter knocking Trump off. But what was your impression about the decision, the way Twitter interacted with itself regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, the Donald Trump suspension. Well, I actually thought there was a little more agonizing over the decision than I would have expected, given my own perception of just how monolithic these companies tend to be with respect to the perspectives that are represented there. So I was pleased to see that. I think it's also

worth remembering that the decision that they made was widely criticized and that it didn't last very long. Eventually, they had to reverse themselves. And in a lot of important respects, there was a kind of stric sand effect. They decided to ban this story and more people... Explain the stricent effect. The stricent effect, and the specific incident I'm not actually familiar with, but the thinking there is that when you prohibit access to certain kinds of information, you actually increase the amount of interest that exists in that information and more people as a result end up seeing it. I know that has something to do with Barbara Streisand,

but I don't remember exactly what the anecdote. I believe it was photos of her home that were available online that she tried sued to get removed and nobody had looked at it before she filed the lawsuit. And then after she filed the lawsuit, millions of people saw the photos of her home. So trying to suppress speech. And there's actually interesting measurable, the Streisand effect was measurable in real time with the Hunter Biden story because when Twitter throttled the story, search interest on Google in the story skyrocketed. And so you can compare the timeline of Twitter

throttling the story and the search interest on Google. And the search interest went way, way, way up, which is exactly predictable according to anyone who has experience with censorship in a free state that censorship tends to magnify interest, which also applies to the CRT bans. But yeah, but the frustrating thing to see in that correspondence was the fact that they really did seem to be kind of inventing rationales on the fly and looking for reasons to take an action that satisfied, perhaps satisfied the biases of particular people within the institution. And there did appear to be some correspondence before this happened between Twitter and some government agencies who are advising them that they ought to be on the lookout for

certain kinds of misinformation. So they've been primed to expect this, which, you know, on one level, okay, that's disconcerting. But on another level, it sounds like a generic warning. And this was Trump's Justice Department that was essentially issuing these warnings. And I don't believe that that was issued with the expectation that the Hunter Biden laptop story was going to come out eventually. So again, even there, I saw when there was discussion about this, a lot of conflation of some of those things. But, you know, I think that's my general take. I mean, I think with Trump and January 6th, on the other hand, I... I have very mixed feelings about it.

I think what I saw, I can appreciate why some company might have made a decision to remove the president from social media at that period of time. What I found disconcerting was the kind of coordinated nature of the behavior amongst all of these different private institutions. There was no directive from the government, but there was this kind of internal, these discussions that were happening between various people's, their counterparts to different companies, and they all essentially seem to make these decisions in lockstep to remove the president from all of the things. And we've actually seen it happen a few times with a couple of

high-profile people. Andrew Tate comes to mind. Gavin McGinnis is another. I'm sure there are others. Alex Jones is another. And I think in general, that's something that ought to be more disconcerting to us. And in general, I think that it would be good if we had a cultural disposition that said, we don't think people are idiots. We don't think merely having access to things that are, you know, perhaps dishonest, less than true, or I should just say, perhaps false, or even might be categorized as incitement, are necessarily, you know, going to perpetuate the fall of the, of the Republic. But on the other hand, if we develop an act, appetite or at least too much of a familiarity or an expectation that people will be wholesale

deleted from the internet when they are suspected of having done something bad or suggesting something sinister, that could actually lead to much worse outcomes in my estimation. So while, you know, Twitter has every right to make the decision they made, I think in general, all of it was kind of a bit of a dark omen. And I'd like to think that we're being a bit more thought about how we proceed with things like that going forward and that there will perhaps be less of an inclination to make that sort of decision. I remember when there was a moment where I believe was CBS News decided that they were no longer going to tweet shortly after Elon took control of Twitter and things started to go a bit crazy and everyone kind of looked at them a bit odd and that lasted about 24 hours and then they reversed the decision and that seems appropriate to me. Yeah. So I have an interesting, let me, let me rephrase that. I have some thoughts on the Trump saga that are related to an actual interaction that I had with, how can I be clear yet vague, a very high level person in social media. So I'm talking to this very high level person in social media. And I was making the pitch that I was making the pitch that I,

I've been making for years, which is, look, don't try to reinvent the wheel on free speech. If you want, if you have a platform where you want free speech to be protected, it's to be a cardinal virtue on your platform. And not all platforms are like that. If you, if you're building like a dating platform that's Christian mingle, well, you could say, well, you know, we want, we want this to be Christian content, right, or whatever. But if you're making a platform where we're opening to everybody and we want to have, you know, dialogue and discourse. I said, why don't go down the path of the speech code, go down the path of the First Amendment. College has spent decades with this speech code nonsense, trying to figure out a way to have all of the best of free speech

and none of the bad. And it was a giant mess. The speech codes were never upheld. The stories you could tell about speech codes were just, you know, put your, make your hair stand on end. It's just very, very difficult. Use the First Amendment as your touchstone. And it's making this case. And then this question was raised. I hear you. That's got a lot.

There's a lot to that. But we operate in places overseas where actual civil unrest will erupt because of what's being, shared on social media. People get hurt and are killed. And they said, would you just want us to let that? And I said, well, you know, look, there is a, unlike the government, which can protect speech and also impose order. In other words, the government should, one of the ways you protect speeches by imposing order, right? Social media companies have no tools to impose order. And if actual disorder is breaking out, and you discern it's because of speech on your platform, I, you know, there are emergencies where you can and should throttle to prevent people killing each other in the real

world. And when I was talking about that, I was thinking of like riots that we've seen pop up in places, you know, overseas that are torn by civil strife. I mean, you know, I think of a country like Mali where there has been civil war, you know, and civil strife and, or other countries where I've seen, not necessarily Mali, but I've seen riots break out because of, and I was thinking of sort of that situation. I was not thinking that that could ever apply to the U.S. And my concern after January 6th is that we were seeing this unfold in the U.S. and that there was violence breaking out in our capital as a result of what we are seeing on social media. So I was very much in favor of at least the temporary suspension of Donald Trump under

that reasoning, that what we were seeing was a violent reaction that was being stoked via social media. And even when I wrote it, I wrote about this and I felt torn, even as I was putting the words to paper on this because I'm as you know Camille we're both free speech advocates but once the violence was breaking out and Facebook had no ability to impose order in the streets Twitter had no ability but what could it do to throttle the violence that was what I was thinking and I'm still not 100% convinced I was right about that to be honest yeah yeah I think it's a really hard call.

I can appreciate why a private company might make that decision. I can also appreciate a private company making the decision to hold the line and to continue to operate in a normal way, appreciating that there are certain risks associated with that and perhaps even social costs that have to be born. I think the reality that there are a particular kind of cultural antibodies that we as a society and a global community perhaps have yet to cultivate, which would perhaps prevent or at least mitigate against the possibility of violence erupting

when certain kinds of things are published online. I think the fact that things can quickly be published that turn out to be untrue is something that more and more people are aware of at this point. And I think more and more people ought to behave accordingly. And the fact that we don't do a very good job of that in many instances, can't, in my estimation, be the reason for, you know, a regime of kind of censorship or kind of content throttling because in general, I just think that that might lead to all sorts of bad outcomes. And it may also, in general, create an expectation that there will be some sort of government action that corresponds to that same sort of imperative to protect the public. And we've already seen that happen in places like Nigeria, for example, where policymakers there made a decision where we're just going to outlaw access to these platforms because it's a source of instability for our societies.

I think that that's a misguided approach. And then in general, there's no substitute for the really difficult hard work of actually making a civil society and maintaining it in a responsible way. It's a real challenge. I mean, I think we're dealing with what kind of Robert Martin Gurry in his book, Revolta, the public describes as, you know, this information tsunami. I think we're still very much becoming learning how to live in a world where so many people have access to the tools that allow them to publish content and reach millions and millions of people.

But that's the world we live in now. We're not going back to the other world. And I think that there are both good and bad things about that. But in general, mostly good. I think of it, and it's sort of the way, if you go back and you look at the industrial revolution, we're in the middle of an information revolution. And there was an industrial revolution. And quite frankly, the world didn't handle it very well.

Because one aspect of the industrial revolution was the industrialization of warfare. And so, you know, and that was an inescapable, for a while, that was an inescapable aspect of the industrial revolution that culminated in two nuclear blasts over Japanese cities in 1945, culminating in sort of the mass industrialization of warfare in World War II. And, you know, you talk about building those antibodies. We actually, after 1945, built some antibodies that said, okay, the way we. handled great power conflict forever we can't do that anymore it's just too dangerous and so we we developed networks of international alliances we developed a united nations we developed a lot of things that have prevented great power direct head-to-head great power conflict for a long time and that's a those are antibodies and i think you hit the nail on the head we have to develop antibodies to the

negative effects of social media because we're not uninventing social media. Yeah. And a lot of folks seem to think we can somehow uninvent it. Right, right. We're not uninventing it. So we have to develop antibodies. Yeah. It is interesting, though.

I mean, even before January 6th, you know, the summer of 2020 was pretty harrowing. And obviously, the general kind of drama of COVID, which I think we're still living with a lot of that in certain respects. and the proliferation of quote-unquote misinformation and disinformation in both regards, we were seeing, you know, these spontaneous, massive protests and demonstrations around the country. We had sections of the country that declared themselves autonomous zones. We still have a few of those, apparently. And people were doing that in many instances in response to media reports from

establishment media organizations, but also in response. to social media posts that they were getting, oftentimes bits and pieces of analysis of stories that were still emerging. And I think in many instances, responding to hysterical, overwrought misrepresentations of things that were happening on the streets. And in general, I think that was that was not great on net. And is it possible that, you know, had someone throttled some of the black labs manner hashtags that that might have helped to mitigate against some of the quote-unquote mostly

peaceful excesses that took place over the course of that summer, I don't know, but I also don't think that would have been the appropriate thing to do. And I suspect, you know, most people on the left would appreciate that in ways that they perhaps don't appreciate it when it comes to say, quote-unquote COVID misinformation or even, you know, Donald Trump in January 6th. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race.

Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Yannex. Let's move from the Twitter talking about itself to the government interacting with Twitter aspect of this. and I'll just go ahead and lay out some of the law because we really have a must versus should dichotomy here. So the law is actually quite protective of what you might call government speech. In other words, government officials have the ability to try to convince or persuade private entities to take a course of action or refrain from a course of action. And it's actually

more broad than many people might think that if you're going to look go through the case law you're going to find that if I'm challenging an action because the government convinced a private company to take a particular kind of action it is a high bar to show coercion and you're going to have to show there are multi-factor tests that are, you know, difficult to apply. But as a general matter, that the bar for coercion is going to be pretty high. And you're going to have to show some existence of some real regulatory authority. You're going to have to show that the speech was perceived as a threat. You're going to have to show, for example, whether the speech that is coming from the government

refers to adverse consequences. And when you look at the, in other words, while the law protects private entities from express threats from the government and implied, the implied has got to be implied so strongly, it almost becomes express. For example, there's a key case out of the Second Amendment involving the FBI trying to get a filmmaker to take down a filmmaker. advertisement for a movie claiming there was going to be a government takeover of New York. And to help persuade, persuade the FBI sent agents to the guy's home. Okay. And in that circumstance, what the Second Circuit said was, yeah, that's probably a First Amendment violation. But we're going to give the government officials qualified immunity anyway.

So that sort of shows kind of how far it has to go to be. clearly a threat. So from the legal sense, under existing law, it was hard for me to find clear evidence of the government crossing the line. Okay. I'm not saying they didn't. It's just the line is a lot further down the line than you might think. Okay. So the question that I have for you, Camille, is let's put aside that did they violate the first Amendment or not question, which I think is open. And should they do, should the government have intervened, use, let's just presume for the moment it was constitutional, should, do we want the government interacting with Twitter

the way we, Twitter files expose the government interacting with Twitter? Yeah, I think I've got to put it into some different buckets. I mean, certainly when I looked at Robbie's reporting about. about Facebook and their interactions with the CDC, it seemed very much as if Facebook was interested in and perhaps even grateful for CDC's involvement, that they wanted them to help figure out what they should and shouldn't be flagging online.

Now, whether or not that has anything to do with some of the public chastising that Facebook had endured, both with respect to COVID in general and the purported misinformation that was there, which we were told repeatedly was, quote, unquote, killing people. But that probably also had something to do with the Russiagate drama, which was a very interesting case study and actually featured Facebook both apologizing profusely for allowing certain kinds of things to be published on their platform and for, quote, unquote, Russian disinformation to be published there. And not that the Russian misinformation is quote unquote, but the proportionality of the concern there is something that ought to be flagged. I don't know if those interactions and the kind of persistent threat to regulate Facebook in some sort of dramatic way was something that perhaps made them a little more open to the possibility of coordinating with the CDC.

But in either case, they did want some of that. So allowing for some of that is probably appropriate. But in other instances, the criminal investigations that were taking place where Facebook had to provide some kind of direct access. to different, not Facebook, but Twitter in this particular case, to their systems and had these ongoing correspondence with different government agencies and different offices. I think that's a little bit more frustrating. And at a minimum, because I'll acknowledge, you know, the blurry line that you described is quite blurry, perhaps frustratingly blurry. But a bit more transparency here in general would do a great deal to put me at a little bit more at ease. I certainly don't like the

prospect of federal operatives showing up at your house, encouraging you to do things because it's a really nice homestead you've got here. I'd hate to, you know, take you away and put you in a cage or something like that or for something to happen to you. Perhaps they're a little vaguer and more sophisticated than that in order to induce me to remove content. I mean, that just that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Yeah, I think of a difference between, let's suppose, so the intelligence, the FBI has a counterintelligence mission. It also has a law enforcement mission. Let's stick with the example of the filmmaker who's putting out a War of the World style mockumentary, or not really mockumentary, faux documentary of a government takeover.

Let's suppose the FBI gets intelligence that people are believing that this is imminent and that the government takeover is imminent and they have credible concerns of violence because folks are believing this sort of, you know, the trailers or whatever for this fake documentary are talking about actual plans that have been uncovered, right? I think it's totally fine for the FBI to call a filmmaker and say, we have received concrete intelligence that says that people might. act violently. And what we're saying is, is there anything you can do to prevent that? Right. Like that, to me, that seems like something different from sort of seeing it and saying, oh, I could see how somebody would be really fooled by this. Let's go to his house. Tell him. So if you have actionable intelligence that's directly within the mission and scope of law enforcement, such as this Twitter account, is actually Russian.

This is actually Russian. It is actually, to me, I have absolutely no problem with that. Well, what I do have more of a problem with is some of what we saw Twitter doing, which was, hey, this account is violating your terms of service. This account is violating your terms. I don't want the FBI monitoring Twitter to see whose tweets are violating the terms of service. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not.

that violates the First Amendment for them to say, hey, Camille has violated the terms of service. I'm just highlighting this. You can do whatever you want with it. That doesn't violate the First Amendment in all likelihood, but I don't like it. Yeah, I mean, it also sounds like a lot of the things that you're describing with respect to this genuine threat that exists, that there probably could be some sort of public declarations about what's happening here that don't disclose any information that might say jeopardize an investigation that's ongoing. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to say something about that with respect to like a Russian asset who's operating a Twitter account. But if in fact there is this publicly presented information that is

potentially dangerous and potentially confusing, cultivating the credibility necessary to be able to issue some sort of public remarks and direct them even at the various social media companies seems totally appropriate. And I think if that happens alongside showing some additional information or detail to the companies in question, then that is even better. But that strikes me as the appropriate way to get this done. And a lot of the kind of clandestine conversations that are taking place, however, like that culture of secrecy around that kind of interaction, I think is generally not healthy and it's probably going to lead to things that if they're not outright abuses look like abuses. Right. So I've got a bigger picture question because I want to be

respectful of your time and I actually still want to talk for like another 45 minutes. Let's do it. So I've got a bigger picture question here. And this is something that I've seen a lot of very smart folks that I respect arguing. And that is. And that is, is, are we, while the social media phenomenon is not going to go away, are we moving away from a world in which one or two or three social media giants have such a dominant position? Are we moving more towards a decentralized social media world? And so one, I want your thoughts on that. And then number two, I want to know, what's your experience of Twitter since Elon Musk took over?

Do you like it more? Just as an end user, do you like it more? Do you like it less and why? But let's start with the bigger one. Are we moving out of an era? Are we finally sort of grappling with the reach of these huge social media companies right as the hugeness of them becomes less relevant? Well, I'm not sure.

It seems to me that most people, to the extent that they're congregating online, are still doing it in these kind of larger ecosystems. So in that respect, they're still important. I don't know that, you know, the mastodons of the world are suddenly going to become a lot more relevant. I think that that kind of great mastodon migration is largely overstated. There's a certain kind of, you know, the network effect is very real. And the fact that that's where most of the people are and that's the best place to be able to reach them, you know, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. That's what's likely to happen.

I do think that more people are using things like telegram and signal to have conversations, these persistent large group conversations because they value their privacy. And a lot of that was, I think, a result of the pandemic and the feeling that you couldn't talk about certain things in public. So, you know, to the extent that's happening, that's probably a good thing. But in general, I think it would actually be better if there were more, if there was greater decentralization and more. people were utilizing a variety of different platforms. I think in general, a lot more competition in the space would make moderation a lot better, would make the overall performance and quality of the services provided by these different platforms a lot better. And unfortunately, I don't know

that there is a sufficient appetite for that just yet. There have been people who've tried to get things started, including the president with truth, social, et cetera. But those generally tend to be, you know, kind of these ideological platforms, and they're frustratingly one note. So that's certainly not something that interests me, but perhaps that's the best way to get to a world where you've got a few more polls where people can congregate. But those platforms don't tend to be the healthiest either from an economic standpoint, at least. It's interesting because if you look at the list of top 10 or top 15, you know, it depends on how you measure and when you measure. But Twitter is either the 15th or the 10th largest social media platform. And if you look at, say, some of the statistics that say it's the 15th largest, telegram is bigger, Pinterest is bigger. If you look at another, I'm looking at a top 10 list. And it says that TikTok, TikTok came out of nowhere in 2016, 2017. Almost nobody's talking about TikTok. Now, by, by,

some measures that has more web traffic than any place, any other website. Snapchat is bigger. Pinterest is bigger. Reddit is bigger. LinkedIn is bigger. So in that sense, it does feel like part of what we're dealing with in Twitter isn't so much, is an artifact of these, of a moment in time that says that Twitter is for this moment in time the place of choice for journalists and government officials. That we're not hashing it out on Reddit. We're not, we're not hashing it out on Pinterest, although that would be interesting.

Here's my new paint scheme in my bedroom. And oh, by the way, we need to send more tanks to Ukraine. So I guess part of that means that this is bleeding into the next question, which is how much longer is Twitter going to be the destination site for your journalist? government official class celebrity, well, not even all celebrities. I mean, Taylor Swift barely tweets, right? Or how long, how much longer is Twitter the home of this kind of intensive leader slash journalist conversation? Yeah, I mean, it's impossible for me to guess at that. It certainly still seems to be the case today. And I think much to the chagrin of many people who would have liked for some of these efforts to move wholesale to some other place to work.

It just has a sufficient amount of network effect already with respect to the people that are there. You've got your account, you've got your profile, you've got your followers, and there just doesn't seem to be any simple way to replicate that any place else. So it could be for a long time to come. I mean, the fact that you can have multiple accounts on multiple places, though, and spend time on multiple platforms, I think always leaves the door open to the possibility that some other entity will arise and be able to compete for attention here. I certainly think it's interesting to see, and this is a slightly different industry, but in search, you have Alphabets Google, which is very much awake to a new challenge from the AI-driven. in chat GPT service, which appears to, and I've tried it, I've been demoing it, offer some really compelling results when it comes to search.

It's a slightly different approach, but it's actually able to give you things in a way that's like very constructive and is a really meaningful rival to what Google has been able to dominate for, you know, a couple of decades. And it's interesting that there's oftentimes this regulatory. impulse to try to kind of crack down on monopolies that different companies are able to achieve, whether it be Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Google's domination of search. But the reality is that there's still a lot of competition out there. And the market will give you eventually, it seems, some meaningful competition that will shake things up in an interesting way.

And I'm hopeful that the chat GPT thing will be wildly successful and that it'll put pressure on Google to do a bit more. Because in general, I think we all benefit from that. Yeah, there's an interesting dynamic that I think there's a commercial vulnerability that Twitter has and that it has an advantage in that there's a lot of high profile users who feel like they need Twitter. in other words it is it would be negative for their careers in any number of ways if they just ditch Twitter because they don't like Elon Musk but at the same time they don't like this thing that they need so you have a product that people feel like they need but they really don't like yeah and what that just screams at the top of its lungs is market opportunity yeah absolutely And so that's one thing that I keep thinking that, you know, is there, there's just a real question about what they dislike, though, because in a lot of instances, my sense is that what they hate, perhaps apart from the leadership, the new leadership of Twitter, are the kinds of interactions that they're having on Twitter and the kind of content that they're exposed to, which, you know, I don't know, I don't know how someone solves that problem, but that's a very different sort of problem.

At some point, I tweeted, not so ironically, that Twitter isn't the problem you are. And what I was suggesting was that in some respect, the energy that you're putting out and the kind of way that you're priming the algorithm with respect to the content you're interacting with probably has a lot to do with the feeling of dissatisfaction that you have when you log on and spend, you know, two hours on Twitter. generally speaking, I'm not there to fight people and punch them in the head. And even if I have something critical to say, I always try to say it in a way that I would say it to you if we were together in person. And I was within arms reach and you might punch me in the head. In which case, I think my experience generally, unless I'm writing something with you in the New York Times, tends to be pretty healthy. I'm feeling suddenly responsible for this very negative experience. But, you know, you can't protect against all of that.

But it's worth acknowledging that some of that is just on us personally. But I'd agree with you. I think there is a market opportunity there. I don't know exactly what that new product looks like or service. Right. But maybe it's something that rides on top of existing social media platforms. Maybe it's a meditation course that helps us to be more responsible Internet users. But it could come in a lot of forms.

Well, that's, you know, you raise a really great point because I do think the way in which people choose to interact with Twitter is very influential on their experience, which is if you can, there are people I knew who have the discipline like, hey, I look, I know I'm being gang tackled right now, but I'm not going to look at it. Right. Exactly. I said what I said. I meant what I said. Unless somebody can point out that I've made an actual mistake, I'm just going to let the let the people get angry. And that's a self-discipline, right? Sometimes you then go, I, Oh, I'll let them be angry. What are they saying? And then you open it up and it's just like, oh, it just, you know, it's just like a body blow. There's a lot of self-discipline, I think, that could make the experience better. But I also wonder, Camille, I have a couple of thoughts about the way in which Twitter is constructed that has nothing to do with moderation policy that make it worse.

And I have two ideas, quote tweeting, I think quote tweeting is a phenomenon. that really gooses engagement on Twitter, but makes the place much worse as a personal experience. And the other one is public replies. And here's what I mean. So if I go on your Instagram page and I reply to you a post on Instagram, it doesn't pop up on my feed of my followers. So in other words, my followers are not reading my reply to you. on your Instagram page. But what both the quote twink function and the fact that when I reply to you, all of my followers see my reply to you on your feed, both of those are gang tackling mechanisms that beg,

really create the dynamic of the swarm. It's not to say that Facebook or Instagram doesn't have swarming, but it's not to say that Facebook or Instagram doesn't have swarming, but it's just not a, it's not characteristic of the platform in the way it is with Twitter. And I just wonder about those two features, the quote tweet and the public reply

or the reply that's visible to my followers or to everyone who, all the followers are the people who reply. I wonder if those are these two dynamics that just combined together to make the place so miserable. Yeah. No, I think that's an interesting question. I would certainly say that on net, when I see people use the quote tweet, unless they're replying in a way that suggests, you know, you need to read this because it's important and they're not really adding much to it. It's overwhelmingly used by people who are trying to own someone else. That said, even the, even the owning, I can appreciate respectful like, hey, you know, who. let's talk about this and the tone of the quote tweet being one that isn't confrontational,

but that's kind of probing and perhaps inviting more people into the conversation. And perhaps I'm saying that because I did that this morning. And I actually had to think a couple of times about whether or not it was better to reply to someone who I happened to know, who tweeted something that I thought was interesting, but probably wrong in some important respects, or to quote tweet it. And I decided to quote tweet it. But again, I tried to do it in a way that was polite and generally informative and meaningfully invited other people into the conversation. And when I've done that, I see a dramatic difference between that and, you know, I'm body slamming you, which I've definitely done in the past as well and have sometimes come to regret when I see the interaction turn exceedingly sour.

and we'll see kind of the litany of replies that show up after I've quote tweeted something that I disliked. And, you know, it's all kind of acrimony. And personally, I just don't, I don't want to stir up acrimony. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And I have to confess, you know, I quote tweet as well. And I have some sort of ethical guidelines of established for myself in the quote tweeting.

One is quote tweets for compliments. Yes, for sure. Quote, quote tweets for critique, I will only do it if I have read the underlying piece. I will only do it if I've not just watched the clip, but understand its larger context. In other words, I don't take a video clip at just pure face value. I try to discern larger context. And so if the video clip, which I've watched in its entirety, is consistent with context, I might quote tweet critically. Or if the article that I'm referring, that I'm quote tweeting, the tweet promoting is, I will, I'm not responding to the tweet. I'm responding to the piece. So I try to do that. But there's one other aspect, and that is, I think a lot of people are wising up to, you talk about building antibodies, to the limits. of the benefit that Twitter gives you. And I'll give you a good example.

I use Twitter to promote my written work. And one day I decided to go back into my analytics and see how many people came to my written work through Twitter versus the whole rest of the universe, search, email, direct. My Twitter, and Twitter is by far my largest social media platform. far more people follow me on Twitter than 5% of readers, 5% of my readers come to my work through Twitter, 95% elsewhere. And that's with Twitter being my largest social media platform. Do you have a sense of what the largest traffic driver is for you?

Email for at the dispatch, it's email. It's people reading it via email and then forwarding. So, in my view, an email list is far more valuable to actually get your message out than a Twitter following. And you constantly see stats like this. So this is my Sunday newsletter about character and politicians. I tweeted once about it, 317,000 views of the tweet, about 9,000 engagements with the tweet, and only 2,500 link clicks. so less than one out of a hundred people who saw the tweet clicked on it interesting yeah yeah I mean we know and we've known for a long time when it comes to you know online marketing

that open rates on say e-commerce emails not great the display ads don't necessarily get great kind of click through or even conversion could be really hard to make to make the sale and certainly to get the click through so even that 5% rate is probably better than a lot of those other mediums might be but one might have expected it to be a bit higher one might expect that most of the people who are following you generally like you and are not hate following you or though i'm confident we both have have plenty of those people too um and at a minimum would be generally interested in what do and what you're doing. But it, Twitter is a kind of micro engagement site and there's this constant stream of content. And I can imagine that it's pretty easy for even something that seems

interesting to you to just kind of get lost in the shuffle and you scroll to the next thing. And you scroll to the next thing. So yeah, I think that's, I think that's probably an appropriate flag. Although generally I'm interested in the reform you suggested with respect to to quote tweets. I will say that community notes, which is still at the moment, kind of an invite only feature in that you have to be permitted in access to the community of people that are allowed to provide a comment on a post that's already been put on Twitter and provide either some additional context or suggest that there be a flag for additional context or something that seems to be meaningfully inaccurate and also provide some links to high quality sources.

And there's a whole kind of sophisticated algorithm for actually approving a community note and putting it high enough in the rankings that it shows up on someone's posts. It seems to me that that is actually a much better way to kind of correct things that seem to be wrong on the platform, even if it's imperfect. And I've definitely found, because I am a part of the community notes system, that I'm much more likely to write one of those and take the time to find a link than I am to quote tweet something that I dislike. I think both because it reaches a little bit further, but also it doesn't have, I think, a lot of the nasty spillover effect, but may actually trigger a response from someone because it's not nice to have your content flagged as. inaccurate and for someone to have the receipts and for it to show up right there underneath your post that's um in a sort of official way that's classic answering bad speech with better

speech yeah which is well camille this has been a great conversation thanks for being so generous with your time and goodness i made the mistake that i make every time i talk about your podcast i call it fifth column not we the fifth oh it's it's the fifth column um you can find it At we the fifth.com and at we the fifth on Twitter, I believe that's the same on Instagram. But yeah, it is the fifth column podcast. So you did not make a mistake. Okay, good. I suppose you did the last time.

But even then, it was an opportunity to promote what we're doing over at the fifth column, where you are always welcome even after you move over to the New York Times or at least spending a bit more time over there with your new colleagues, who I am sure all very enthusiastic about your arrival. All universally. Okay. So Dom, our producer is saying I originally said we the fifth instead of the fifth column. Okay.

So I just, I'm hopelessly confused. But it's fine. I will say it is a great podcast. Thank you very much. The fifth column is a great podcast. And literally I would always love to come back because it's been one of my favorite guesting experiences. But I strongly endorse the podcast. You guys have a great rapport.

You talk about interesting stuff. you do it in a thoughtful way. It's fun to listen to. And hey, let's co-author again and see what we can stir up. Let's do it. Well, thank you, Camille. And thank you, listeners. Please subscribe.

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