The Story Behind the Twitter Files

In December, The Free Press was invited by Elon Musk to Twitter HQ, where we were given access to the company’s vast archive of internal communications. In the weeks that followed, we broke stories that revealed how a handful of unelected individuals at this private company put its thumb on the scale to manipulate the public discourse. We hosted the reporters who were on the ground—Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Nellie Bowles—for a subscriber-only conversation about their reporting. Visit www.thefp.com and subscribe to attend future events. Read about our reporting at Twitter: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-we-went-t... 00:00 - Bari welcomes reporters 02:30 - What are the Twitter files? 03:50 - People’s fears about censorship were true 06:50 - Why this story matters to regular people 08:15 - Covid censorship by Twitter 09:51 - Twitter Files is inconvenient to mainstream media 11:41 - How leftists are defending corporations and government 14:45 - The town square has been digitized 16:31 - How Twitter censorship impacted real-world consequences 20:37 - The use of the “do not amplify” label 23:15 - Ozempic public conversation similarities 24:20 - The Hunter Biden laptop story 30:35 - What it was like on the ground 34:46 - How they accessed the files 38:30 - How the picked which stories to cover 39:35 - The problems with Twitter algorithms 42:38 - The challenges of making everything public 45:45 - Bari publicly sparring with Elon Musk 49:10 - Surprises about Elon Musk 51:10 - Did telling Twitter files impact reporters’ politics 54:47 - Transparency around content moderation is key 56:36 - Musks motivation for Twitter Files