We’ve detailed the so-called Twitter Files in numerous posts, but political analyst Ben Domenech points to a serious flaw in the whole enterprise — releasing the Files on Twitter itself in several series of tweets.

The gradual release of the Twitter Files is impressive in its scale and its revelations about the internal workings of Twitter over the past several years. The cooperative release of information was driven by new Twitter chieftain Elon Musk, via a collection of heterodox thinkers such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger.

It has a number of interesting things to tell us: about the process by which Twitter engaged in the mass shadowbanning of individual accounts whose views internal members found unseemly, about the jump to conclusions about Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop story that resulted in a direct assault on accounts directed by contrarians and conservatives, and about the overall Calvinball approach to rules and regulations where firm principles turned malleable in the interests of “protecting” users from speech deemed dangerous.

It’s also, as a method of storytelling, a bust.

The problem here is that Musk has gone about telling this internal story via his own newly acquired app, where threads are lengthy and difficult to follow. The headlines around these internal unveilings should be huge — but ask even the politically interested but not permanently online what it’s all about, and they’ll struggle to tell you.

The whole thing changes the way the stories are consumed. People can’t grasp or retain the biggest parts of the stories because the release has been so stilted. “It’s a shame,” says Domenech, “because this is so important.” He then explains why:

What the Twitter Files truly reveal is that the debate about Twitter’s capacity as a platform vs a publisher is over. They were making constant editorial decisions about the material on their site, without any true motivation related to safety or criminality. They were actively restricting what people could read and see based on their own biases. They were routinely shoving certain material into a box to hide it from their users just because they disliked the conclusions people would draw. As a regulatory matter, they pretend to be a platform — but they are a publisher, no different in practice from editors at the Washington Post. Any claims to neutrality are lies — and any designs on being treated as a good-faith arbiter are right out.

That’s exactly the argument we’ve been making from the beginning, and it goes to the heart of why the censorship is so problematic. Domenech concludes:

Let’s hope other entities take up the Twitter Files as deserving of serious coverage. But in a sense, this meandering botched launch serves as a reminder that Musk personally may be with the contrarian anti-woke conservatives, not of them. In much the same way that he is clearly a natalist in his personal life, but also perfectly fine with abortion, his unique approach to gathering and processing information is a fascinating bit of his genius eccentricity — but it’s also a real drag on his ability to communicate a story to the public. On the Twitter front, that’s a real problem — because the public very much needs to know the truth about what happened, before it inevitably happens again.

Read the whole thing here.