Twitter is treated across these episodes as a private social media platform whose content-moderation decisions became the subject of antitrust argument, statutory debate and constitutional speculation. The excerpts do not supply a corporate history, founding date or ownership timeline beyond the fact that Elon Musk purchased the company’s outstanding stock and that it was previously owned by Jack Dorsey.
Brevity and the tweet
Bob Zadek opened one discussion by defending Twitter against criticism of the mandatory brevity of tweets. He compared short tweets to Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to Poor Richard’s Almanack, describing them as short homilies that were often wise and often humorous, and suggested Franklin might have been America’s first tweeter. He told his guest not to knock brevity On Crowds and Tribalism (2019).
Antitrust and the dozen keystrokes
In a later episode, Bob asked Ryan Young what the antitrust and free speech complaint against Twitter amounted to. Young, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said there was no antitrust angle. He said he had yet to hear a good response to what he called the dozen keystrokes argument, and described a co-worker who switched away from Google’s default search on an iPhone in three taps. He said that by itself collapses an antitrust argument on free speech Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
Young characterized the dispute as hinging on politics rather than the merits. He said Republicans wanted to regulate political speech in their favor, that the incoming Democratic executive branch would take the precedent and new powers Republicans were gearing up to use and use them against Republicans, and that this political short-sightedness could have disastrous long-term consequences for companies that do not have monopoly power. He said consumers decide whether Twitter, Facebook and Google rise and fall, noting that Google took over from Yahoo and Altavista and Facebook from Myspace because they did it better. He called freedom of speech one of his few absolutes: government should not regulate speech.
Bob asked what governmental interest could justify concern over what Twitter did, including the blocking of the New York Post’s Twitter feed. Young said the government should not care. He said Twitter made a mistake when it muted the Hunter Biden story the New York Post published, that other outlets including the Wall Street Journal thought the story was not adequately sourced, and that if he were running Twitter he would have let the story through. He called it a business decision, not a legal issue, and said the publicity produced a Streisand Effect that doubled the story’s reach.
Asked by Bob to explain the term, Young described Barbra Streisand suing to stop a tabloid from running a photo of her beachfront home, and the suit amplifying the story instead. He said the same thing happened with Twitter and the Hunter Biden story, and that when people try to clamp down on speech they often generate more of it.
Bob summarized that dusting off antitrust litigation against Google and social media more broadly was unsupportable on antitrust grounds, and that the government’s only possible interest lay in Section 230. He said that under existing legislation Twitter, Facebook and Google are free to do what they want editorially, or are not allowed to exercise editorial control if they are just a platform; once they editorialize, a different body of law is triggered and they could be liable for defamation, raising litigation exposure and the cost of doing business. He said they are deathly afraid of being accused of exercising editorial control and of being like a newspaper deciding what gets printed. Young gave the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s website and its antitrust site.
The Twitter Files and the state-action question
In a 2023 episode guest-hosted by Bob Zadek, he said Elon Musk was disclosing daily, in the Twitter Files, the role Twitter played, and that this introduced a hard legal and constitutional question: when does the Constitution start to have something to say about the behavior of a private company? He asked whether there is a point at which a private company becomes enough like government that it is government, and said that if Twitter crossed that line and acted like it was under the day-to-day control of a government, then it is not a big jump to say it is government, the First Amendment applies, and Twitter has as little right to censor as the government [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]].
Bob described the book under discussion as Robert Mahoney’s The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, and said Mahoney examines the confluence of the COVID pandemic and the use of censorship by governments in the US and around the world to suppress free speech. Bob said Twitter, though a private enterprise, had intense and intimate contacts with the federal government, which had a substantial degree of control over what Twitter allowed to be published, circulated and promoted, and what it suppressed; that Twitter did the bidding of the government; and that if it was behaving like a federal agency, a court might determine that for First Amendment purposes Twitter is a governmental agency, making what it did illegal.
Mahoney said that when he and his co-author Joel Simon did their research, Twitter was a different company under the ownership of Jack Dorsey, with nothing to do with Elon Musk, and that the Twitter Files revelations were new and not part of what they looked at in 2020. He said the book looked at social media across platforms and countries rather than singling out Twitter, alongside Facebook and other platforms. He described algorithms that promote content which keeps users in front of the screen — enragement is engagement — and said governments, private individuals and news organizations all used that. He said that from what he had seen of the revelations, he did not think the federal government was telling Twitter what to do, but that Twitter acted under public pressure to edit certain content, particularly tweets from political leaders including Donald Trump about COVID treatments such as anti-malarials and hydroxychloroquine, which were at first promoted and then de-amplified.
Jawboning
In a January 2023 episode with Will Duffield, Bob said Musk’s purchase of all of Twitter’s outstanding stock set in motion the Twitter Files and the baring of a scary aspect or new approach of jawboning that challenges core free speech in America ‘Jawboning against Speech’ with Will Duffield (2023). Duffield described the Twitter Files as a collection of documents released by a number of journalists from Twitter over the past three or four years, recounting decisions Twitter made and engagements it had with the federal government. Bob interrupted to correct the word “decisions,” and Duffield accepted the correction, saying many of those decisions were not entirely Twitter’s because another hand was involved or there was pressure behind the scenes.
Duffield said his paper that fall concerned congressional jawboning — members of Congress publicly browbeating platforms to moderate more or remove foreign influence — and that only through the Twitter Files did the private side of that story emerge: after being browbeaten by Congress, platforms turned to or allowed the FBI and then an alphabet soup of intelligence community agencies and State Department operations to forward on requests, all in the background while Congress threatened to regulate them if they did not do more. He said the Twitter Files, and importantly a series of lawsuits by the states of Missouri and Louisiana aimed at the CDC and the Biden administration, revealed communications with Facebook that looked fairly similar, and that this was aimed at many platforms, not one. He said platforms failed to do their due diligence, lacked the time or resources, and defaulted into accepting government demands and removing speech.
Bob characterized the decision as the kind explained by a dark alley and a gun at your head — your money or your life — a choice, but not quite. Duffield said jawboning is often compared to the mafioso suggestion that you have an awfully nice business there. Bob modified the phrase that the power to tax is the power to destroy into the power to regulate is the power to destroy, and said Twitter knew its life could be hell if government power were aimed at it, that it could be taken apart or attacked on antitrust grounds, and that a regulated industry has little choice but to follow government instructions and take the heat for what is really governmental action. Duffield said that before the Twitter Files and before the CDC’s engagement with Facebook was known, these decisions were taken to be solely private and platforms suffered reputational harms, and that the costs of government decisions about what speech should be allowed accrued to private companies.
Across episodes
The excerpts show a shift rather than a sustained argument. In the 2020 episode Ryan Young treated Twitter’s content decisions as private business mistakes and rejected both antitrust and government regulation of speech; by 2023 Bob Zadek and Will Duffield treated the same platform’s decisions as coerced by government, with Bob advancing the state-action question and Duffield supplying the jawboning account. Robert Mahoney, in the intervening episode, declined to say the federal government was telling Twitter what to do, describing public pressure instead.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Twitter’s founding date, its corporate structure, or the terms of Musk’s purchase beyond his acquisition of the outstanding stock. They do not describe the contents of Section 230, the holding or amendment at issue in the Missouri and Louisiana suits, or the outcome of any litigation. The Mahoney excerpt breaks off mid-sentence, and the Duffield excerpt ends with Bob beginning a reply.