[Freddie deBoer] The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw

The Maw is, broadly speaking, the expression of the culture war as operationalized by the consensus opinions of media. The Maw is the aggregate of opinions of paid-up journalists and writers and pundits and, specifically, the opinions they will allow. When a big story breaks, there’s an initial feeling-out period where the media talks to itself and decides what the consensus opinion will be. As time has gone on, this process has gotten faster and faster, so that now the media consensus and the expectation that all decent people will glom onto it develop in a matter of minutes. What’s interesting about the Twitter files is that both an inciting incident (the Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship by Twitter) and an eventual consequence of it (the release of the Twitter files) fell into the Maw with incredible speed. Immediately, in 2020, the enforced consensus within media was that there was no story to speak of regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was not only not worthy of influencing the election, it should not have been reported on at all, and Twitter’s decision to artificially limit its spread was justified. So too with the Twitter files: as soon as Matt Taibi started tweeting about them, it seems, most in newsmedia were convinced they were unimportant. This is the Maw at work - it’s the expression of culture war in what the media sees as a respectable position to hold. In the Maw, nothing independent survives.

To consider the Maw, I’ll look at this piece by New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz.

As a preliminary - there is, of course, an immense hypocrisy at play with Twitter these days; for years, left-leaning people had justified all of Twitter’s moderation policies, such as their censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the lab leak Covid-19 hypothesis, by saying “Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want. Don’t complain.” Twitter is still a private company, and its owner is now doing what he wants. Those same people are complaining about it. This is one of those petty hypocrisies that you really can’t get out of. If you thought that saying Twitter is a private company was a legitimate response to criticism of its moderation practices under previous ownership (including, let us not forget, the rulers of a brutal theocratic dictatorship), then you must accept it as a legitimate response to criticism of the new regime. Gooses and ganders. But then, hypocrisy is only human.

Levitz goes through the Twitter files story, pulls the various strands apart, and in each instance arrives at an opinion that is sufficiently nuanced to save face but which will in every instance satisfy the Maw. Perhaps the Hunter Biden story should not have been censored - but there’s no evidence it was censored for political ends, and anyway, maybe censoring the story increased its reach. Perhaps there’s lots of corruption floating around Hunter Biden - but petty corruption is no big deal, and anyway there’s no way Joe Biden, the Senator from MasterCard, was complicit in anything untoward. Perhaps there were inequities in how accounts were “shadowbanned” and had their reach limited - but there’s no evidence that the Twitter team responsible for those actions, every member of which was left-leaning, did so along partisan lines. Perhaps an esteemed epidemiologist had his tweets artificially repressed by the algorithm at a time when there was public fervor to censor dissident perspectives on Covid - but hey, we can’t prove why they did it. Perhaps this room is filled with smoke - but we have no documentary evidence of fire. Again and again, there’s an issue that could appear to have obvious public interest, but again and again, there’s some piece of administrivia that excuses that issue. And since the highlighting of the initial issues is so reliably dismissed via the motivated reasoning, there’s little danger of Levitz falling on the wrong side of the Maw.

In other words, Levitz knows that he’s publishing a piece with some caveats and provisos for an audience that will not spend a single moment caring about the caveats and provisos. He’s conceding things that he knows his audience will never concede. He constructs the appearance of being evenhanded while keeping one hand in his pocket.