Release the X Files ⇥ msnbc.com

Mike Masnick, for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and … crickets. The silence is deafening.

One might point to Masnick’s seat on Bluesky’s board of directors as evidence of some kind of conflict of interest; indeed, that is the only complaint I have seen from anyone named in this article or associated with the “Twitter Files”. Sure, it would have been a good idea to disclose that in Masnick’s author bio or somewhere in the piece. But that is not a substantial explanation for the different response to two White House-connected social media platforms after the manufactured alarmism over internal Twitter moderation deliberations.

It is possible these writers — Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss — might eventually post some token objection to Musk’s governance of X and his close government ties. Trump’s Truth Social might even worry them. But there will be no response similar to the Twitter Files: no Congressional hearings at which one of the writers declares (PDF) this a “grave threat”; no wall-to-wall media coverage; and no awkward pretensions about the gravity of this relationship. Instead, these same writers will — as they did during the last Trump presidency — likely mock anyone fretting about this very real close coordination happening right before our very eyes.