Twitter pulls back the curtain

Last night, Twitter did something remarkable: it pulled back the curtain to begin revealing the extent to which it:s been involved in suppressing information.

It had long been supposed that this kind of suppression of speech was taking place, but it'd been difficult to understand in detail without internal insight. With Elon Musk at the helm this finally became possible. And it's exactly as suspected: Twitter manipulated information in for purely party political purposes.

The significance of this is that search and social media platforms are how we source information in the modern world. So, manipulation of these platforms for party political purposes by tech at the behest of one party or another makes it impossible for us to gain a thorough understanding of the world. If anything that one party doesn't like is labelled fake news or Russian disinformation, then our understanding of the world is corrupted. In the analogue era, information contained in an encyclopaedia could only be suppressed by editing the next edition. Now, we have confirmation that it can and does happen in real time.

But why should Musk do this? Because he know that people's trust in tech, in Twitter, is ebbing fast. It's fast becoming as untrustworthy as media, politicians and institutions. The only way Twitter can become more valuable to more people and consequently grow its user base is to regain trust. It can only do that by admitting its own culpability in the manipulation of our perception of the world. And more is to come.

I thought that the reaction to Twitter being acquired by Musk was coming from institutions, and the journalists who amplify and shield them losing their plaything platform. Instead, the true root cause may be that one of the most powerful tools for institutions to manipulate public understanding of them has been lost.

What we need next is a broad investigation of all the major search engine and social media platforms. We need a complete understanding of what is being done to our understanding of the world and each other. We need to understand who is benefitting from our understanding being corrupted irrespective of their political or institutional tribe.

If it's been happening at Twitter, why on earth should we believe that it stopped there?