Twitter Files

The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.

After the first set of files was published, an assortment of technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly; while conservative journalists characterized the documents as confirmation of Twitter's liberal bias. In a June 2023 court filing, Twitter attorneys strongly denied that the Files showed what Musk and many Republicans claimed, and asserted that Republican officials also made takedown requests so often that Twitter had to keep a database tracking them.

The files state that U.S. government agencies asked Twitter to blacklist certain accounts, and that accounts run by the U.S. military were left online for years before finally being taken down. According to The Times, Twitter knowingly aided the U.S. military in swaying public opinion, including allowing intelligence officials to publish false stories under fake names to advance U.S. policy objectives.

The releases prompted debate over the nature of blacklisting, vows for congressional investigation, calls for the full release of all documents for the sake of transparency, and calls to improve content moderation processes at Twitter.