The Twitter Files exemplify what they’re allegedly revealing

The hand jobs MAGA pundits Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been giving the world’s richest man are revealing, albeit for the opposite reason that they claim they are:

Specifically, Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who have long endorsed aspects of the GOP’s indictment of the platform. Taibbi and Weiss proceeded to publish a pair of exposés on Twitter’s inner workings. Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity. Musk’s commentary on the Twitter Files, meanwhile, proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.

For these reasons, the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.

What the TWITTER FILES do not contain is any reason for anybody to care about the dumbest pseudo-scandal ever:

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

As Levitz details. ultimately the coked-up Twitter threads by Taibbi and Weiss reveal nothing scandalous about Twitter, but scanadalous conduct by Musk and the “journalists” willing to write dishonest press releases for him:

The Twitter Files provide limited evidence that the social-media platform’s former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. The project offers overwhelming evidence that Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation. In that sense, Taibbi and Weiss have performed revelatory journalism.

Both have a long history of telling on themselves, advertently or otherwise, so they were a good choice to deliver the nothingburgers.