Last week, the journalist Bari Weiss dissected the latest batch of the ‘Twitter Files,’ and while this crackdown on censorship should be applauded, is there anything the public should know about Weiss before getting too excited?
While Twitter BE (Before Elon) had become shockingly proficient at hiding information – and incriminating laptops – from select audiences, it failed to employ that same level of obsessive censorship against its incoming owner, who currently owns the keys to the kingdom. And now, with ‘Twitter Files 2’ competing with Avatar 2 for popcorn sales, former CEO Jack Dorsey must be kicking himself for not having installed a ‘kill switch’ on the entire operation.
Last week, all eyes were on Bari Weiss’ Twitter account as the independent journalist served up the latest batch of Twitter files to demanding audiences. In contrast to Matt Taibbi’s initial release, which showed how Twitter took marching orders from the Biden campaign to block the New York Post’s bombshell report on how Hunter Biden and ‘the big guy’ ran an international pay-to-play operation from Kiev to Beijing, Weiss’ 27-point thread showed how the social media monster was secretly ‘blacklisting’ many conservative posts and users.
So far, so good. Musk and his merry messengers seem very committed to coming clean about Twitter’s list of past transgressions, which could have been responsible for swinging the 2020 presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor. Hopefully, Musk is sincere about free speech ‘absolutism’ and the world’s largest and most influential electronic town square will become a real model for democracy in our times. Yet still, I had some personal doubts.
The more I read through the posts on Weiss’ page, the more I considered the messenger and her own questionable record of battling censorship, not to mention her dogged support of the establishment and its gung-ho interventionist US foreign policy. This may be an indication as to the future direction of Twitter, since there is talk that Weiss could be offered a position on the social media platform. In any case, the seasoned journalist, who has worked for both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, was seen last week at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where she has been “given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop,” according to Business Insider.
In Weiss’ second posting on the Twitter files, she lamented that Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected, she noted. Yet Weiss, whom The Financial Times once described as a "self-styled free speech martyr," has been no slouch herself when it comes to erecting barriers to free speech, going so far as attempting to have academic voices silenced at her alma mater, Columbia University.
As a student at Columbia, Weiss took a prominent role in the so-called Columbia Unbecoming controversy, which focused mostly on Joseph Massad, a Palestinian assistant professor who taught a course entitled ‘Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies’, in which the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people featured prominently. Weiss took issue with Massad’s message, at one point saying she felt “intimidated” in his lectures, without ever specifying why, while also complaining that "[T]he amount of time he spent talking about Zionism or the Jewish nation or Jewish culture was inappropriate." Yet, considering the title of the course, what did she really expect?
Weiss’ student activism against Massad, which smacks of the cancel culture inquisition that has come to dominate US academia today, was derided by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote that Weiss and others set out to “ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions."
And then there is Weiss’ staunch support for the muscular US foreign policy of interventionism, and her fierce denunciation for anyone who disagrees with her position, like US politician Tulsi Gabbard, whom she denounced as an “Assad toadie” in an interview with Joe Rogan. This remark was in response to Gabbard’s decision to personally meet with the Syrian leader, in Damascus, on a “fact-finding mission” rather than depending on the mainstream media to supply the “facts” for her.
Upon her return from Syria, Gabbard told CNN she was “skeptical” that Bashar al-Assad’s government was behind chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people in Syria, which were being used as a pretext for initiating a US military attack against the country. “Why should we just blindly follow this escalation of a counterproductive regime-change war,” she asked.
It’s worth asking if such anti-establishment views will be tolerated on Twitter when the next US interventionist war begins. After all, the ongoing censorship of major media outlets, RT and Sputnik included, continues. At a time when the world needs a variety of informational resources to understand what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, and perhaps more importantly why they are happening, Russian news sources have not only been silenced on Twitter, but across much of the Western hemisphere. On this sad state of affairs when it comes to free speech ‘absolutism’ Weiss has, thus far, remained silent. Whether or not that will change in the next installment of the Twitter Files remains to be seen.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.