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December 27, 2022

The Conservative Treehouse was incredibly prescient about Twitter

By Andrea Widburg

The latest Twitter file drop makes it even more explicit than before: the American government was Twitter’s secret partner. That’s why Joe Biden felt comfortable ordering an ostensibly private corporation to silence critics. Readers of The Conservative Treehouse are surprised because the site predicted this partnership months ago. While his details may be off, his instincts were spot-on.

Before the 10th drop, we learned that the FBI and CIA were constantly demanding information from Twitter and instructing it about which accounts it needed to drop. The 10th drop shows that this went all the way up to the White House.

The government-Twitter relationship is important because Twitter wasn’t just any company. Social media sites usurped the old means by which people communicated, becoming the new public forum. They promised their sites were modern bulletin boards on which users could freely post social and political information, provided the content was inherently legal. This bulletin-board status matters because, by claiming they were curators, not editors, Section 230protected them from libel actions based on the content their users posted on the sites.

But of course, neither Twitter nor Facebook was a neutral bulletin board policing only for clearly illegal content such as child porn (rife on Twitter until Musk took over) or threats to kill someone (also rife on Twitter if directed at Libs of TikTok). Instead, both sites engaged in heavy-handed policing, silencing anything or anybody that ran afoul of Democrat policies or beliefs regarding COVID, transgenderism, Ukraine, Trump, Hunter Biden, etc.

Before Musk took over, conservatives were able to infer this from the manifest conduct in which sites such as Twitter and Facebook engaged—and it mattered a great deal because this censorship affected election outcomes and public policy. When they complained, they were told that, notwithstanding the Section 230 protections from which they benefitted, the social media companies were private companies, so they could do anything they wanted.