Smell Test

A (minimally researched) view from the outside:

Something is rotten in Twitter land.  As a non-user but frequent lurker on Twitter I've been watching the drama of the "Twitter files" with some consternation.  Aside from blog posting and the occasional "liking" of a YouTube video, lurking in search of material to think, write or just feel about is what I tend to do on the internet. I don't need to participate, but I do need to consume and the pace and volume of new tweets makes Twitter one of those sites that rewards checking.  Are there other Twitter lurkers out there?  Do they feel the same sense of bemusement about the drama of the past several months?  

Lurking on Twitter was originally rather uncomplicated.   I could scroll up and down the page at will, able to click on any tweet in order to follow the thread of the commentary. Once upon a time I could actually even see who liked any tweet I happened to come across-- all without logging in.  Although the ability to see who liked what was taken away without my noticing it, for years I remained able to scroll at will and click to pursue the contents of a thread as I wished.  At some point in the past year, however-- prior to the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk-- that ability changed unceremoniously as I discovered to my dismay on a day that was otherwise like any other.  Scrolling down a list of tweets, I suddenly got thwarted after only a handful  by a page-commandeering message to the effect that if I wanted to see more I was going to have to log in.  No way around it.  My screen froze.  Was it some glitch or fluke?  No, it happened every time I refreshed the page. Curses!  Foiled again!  By trial and error I learned an evasive technique: the secret was pre-scrolling beyond the magic error triggering number of tweets before they loaded and the page was able to lock.  Performed correctly, the move would free me up in only one direction-- avoiding the blockade I could go backward in time down the page from the blockade at least until I hit the next show-stopping blockade another several dozen tweets or so in the history.  I could not however click on a tweet to follow the context it was posted in-- that move got the page-freezing stop message-- which made more than a few tweets completely mysterious in their meaning.  However, with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter (with the help of some gullible Saudi investors), that joy-killing behavior of the site was mercifully removed and my ability to scroll and pursue any tweet was once again restored.  From a lurking perspective, then, who was I to complain?

Of course I'd love to see Elon Musk fall flat on his fat face-- in spite of the impossibility of that given his obscenely golden ticket.  But when Musk solicited a number of willing reporters including Matt Taibbi* and Bari Weiss to sift through communications his people had uncovered in the Twitter vaults between government officials and Musk's predecessors in the executive suites at Twitter, to use Twitter as their platform to document unsavory influence in the suppression and removal of tweets not of the government officials' liking, it was rather difficult to care both about what Musk and his journalistic minions supposedly revealed about our power Elite's access to the black hole of Twitter's dominion over speech on its very influential platform, but also frankly about the import of Musk, Taibbi and Weiss's tacky and crude posturing as would-be Snowden's about diddly squat.  So Biden and his team did what they could to muscle Twitter executives into removing embarrassing tweets about Biden's embarrassing son from the platform and succeeded.  <yawn>  So Musk revealed himself to be a petty little turd about the Twitter executives and former pains in his ass he succeeded and Weiss and Taibbi -- perhaps merely innocently seizing an opportunity gifted to them by the world's richest man to cling to cultural relevance -- were his good little puppy dogs.  What else is new?   They have all already amply demonstrated who they are repeatedly. For this Twitter passive spectator, the stunt neither enhanced nor further tarnished already pretty soiled specimens of their fields.  If you were enlightened by any of it, welcome to the twenty first century.

Some members of Congress did not appreciate the lopsidedness of the reportage out of the Twitter files.  Only Democrats were given the Taibbi treatment after all.  Biden was still a private citizen at the time of his apparent improprieties.  What about incidents involving standing members of the Trump administration who were actually government officials at the time of their confabs with Twitter over the removal of unfavorable tweets?  Under grilling by Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Taibbi tripped over his tongue trying to explain away the oversight.  

Elsewhere, apparently the day he was testifying before Congress, an IRS agent paid a house call to Taibbi's residence to see what could be done about a filing problem Taibbi had had with the agency with one of his returns. The ubiquity of the incident in the headlines of right-spectrum news sites and its dearth of a presence (or shrugging off) in more Democratically leaning spaces is what motivated this post. 

When Elon Musk is commissioning the exposé of the exerted influence of political campaigns, agencies and individuals of the government on speech on the ubiquitous platform he has just purchased; when left wing media is urging us not to care that Twitter executives acted as if they knew Russiagate was not a fraud; when Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the one exposing the selectivity of Taibbi's revelations with the Twitter files; when the IRS thoughtfully picks the occasion of his testimony before congress to darken Taibbi's doorway, is there anyone to root for? 

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* Am I the only one to notice that 9 times out of 10 the most frequent offenders of horseshoe anti-woke journalism, commentary and pointless mischief  are the wild children of  famous, wealthy or powerfully privileged families?  I don't draw any conclusions from this.  I'm just raising questions.