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The Twitter Files
Confirmed

Musk buys Twitter, fires executives, adopts 'freedom of reach'

Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter and removed its top executives, including Vijaya Gadde. He reinstated banned accounts and opened internal files to journalists. His new policy openly limited the reach of some tweets, which critics compared to shadowbanning.

Oct 27, 2022
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Whose side it served: Republicans

The reinstatements and document releases chiefly benefited right-leaning accounts and critics of the old regime, while the new reach limits applied to content Musk deemed hateful.

What the record shows

Musk completed the $44 billion deal in late October 2022. CEO Parag Agrawal, legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, CFO Ned Segal and general counsel Sean Edgett left. On November 18, 2022, Musk reinstated accounts including the Babylon Bee and announced 'freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,' saying negative or hateful tweets would be 'max deboosted & demonetized.' From December 2, 2022, Musk gave journalists access to internal records that became the Twitter Files.

In their words

“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”— Elon Musk, Twitter owner · source
“What Elon Musk is describing here is 'shadowbanning.'”— Robby Soave, Reason senior editor · source
The other side

Reason's Robby Soave and others noted that the new reach policy described the same practice the Twitter Files criticized. In April 2023, tweets with Substack links were briefly restricted after Substack launched a competing product, drawing objections from Twitter Files author Matt Taibbi.

Sources

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