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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On the day after Raphael Warnock beat Herschel Walker for US Senate in the Georgia runoff, another defeat for a candidate from the most Trump-associated wing of the Republican Party. Remember, the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, who stood up to Trump to certify the 2020 vote, won reelection this year, but the Trump-backed Republican, Walker, lost. Kemp in his election got four percentage points more than Walker did in his.

Yes, America, there are still swing voters in our mostly polarized country. For those swing voters, a close association with Trump and election denying proved to be a big liability in most of the midterm elections with this final example now on the books. Yesterday was a bad day for the former president on a number of fronts. His business, the Trump Organization, was convicted of criminal tax fraud.

Trump himself signed some of the checks that were central to the case. The House January 6th committee chairman said they'd be making criminal referrals to the US Justice Department. That was a new development. Chairman, Benny Thompson didn't say who they would make referrals about, but we know their presentations have focused largely on Trump's own actions. One more that's very interesting, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, said Trump would have a hard time being sworn in again as president because in the social media post over the weekend, maybe you missed this, Trump called for suspending the constitution, believe it or not.

Referring to the 2020 election, Trump said, he posted on his social media site, "A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution." Remember, when a president is sworn in, they promise in the oath of office to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Remember that? Trump endorsed suspending the Constitution of the United States, the opposite of the promise when you get sworn in. McConnell said--

Mitch McConnell: Anyone seeking the presidency who thinks that the constitution could somehow be suspended or not followed, it seems to me would have a very hard time being sworn in as president of United States.

Brian Lehrer: Mitch McConnell yesterday at his weekly news conference answering a question from Manu Raju of CNN. Later in the show this morning, NPRs Andrea Bernstein will tell us more about the conviction of the Trump organization. That's a New York story, as well as a national one. Right now, we'll take a closer look at the new controversy surrounding Twitter and its new owner Elon Musk, that led Trump to propose suspending the constitution. New York Times media correspondent, Michael Grynbaum, joins us for that.

This is an important story in its own right. Trump, or no Trump, we should say, about what standards Twitter or any social media company should use for blocking information that it deems to be misinformation. We'll also touch on Michael's article about what networks people are watching election returns on, and what that says about who we all are. Listeners, where did you watch the Warnock/Walker returns last night? We'll talk about people leaving Twitter and who's deciding to stay. Michael, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Michael Grynbaum: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having me this morning.

Brian Lehrer: I think before we open the phones, we should start at the beginning on this particular Twitter story because many listeners don't know about this case at all. Then we'll talk about Musk's decision on Friday and the larger implications for truth and freedom on social media generally. During the 2020 election campaign, the New York Post published a story about Hunter Biden and Twitter executives at the time decided to block posts that link to it. What was the story and why did Twitter limit its dissemination?

Michael Grynbaum: This is among the more convoluted sagas, so we'll try to comb through it piece by piece. It really did set up a firestorm. This brings us back to October 2020 right at the climax of the presidential campaign when the New York Post published that story. What happened was that Twitter decided because the story was based on data from a abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden's, and it was unclear at that time, there was some debate over whether the data had been hacked, that it would be irresponsible to allow it to be disseminated on Twitter as widely as other news stories.

The platform, it actually turned off the New York Post Twitter account and it began suspending accounts including from the Kayleigh McEnany, who at the time was a White House Press secretary, who we're linking to this particular story.

Some of the context is really for the media, some of the hangover from 2016. If you remember the WikiLeaks, the hack emails from the Democratic National Committee that proved rather embarrassing for Hillary Clinton in her campaign. I think that Twitter was very concerned that perhaps this information was either been obtained through illegal means, was being weaponized in ways that would result in Biden being unfairly assailed for it, and there was a debate within the organization about whether to allow it to be distributed.

Brian Lehrer: Twitter's CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, was not part of the decision to block that material, and your article reminds us that Dorsey later reversed that decision to block and said it had been a mistake. What was Jack Dorsey's reasoning for that?

Michael Grynbaum: This was really fraught even at the time, and there was quite a bit of news coverage about it. I should note also that many organizations, including the New York Times, were attempting to examine the evidence that the New York Post had presented trying to obtain it independently themselves to see if there was any news worth reporting there.

Dorsey, just a few weeks later or it might have been even within two weeks, I'm forgetting the exact timeline, but reversed it and said it had been a mistake not to allow what was an article in the New York Post, which although leading right is certainly a major national news outlet, that to simply suppress the story as opposed to allowing the public discourse to run its course, allowing other journalists to debate the merit of the story, was, in fact, not the right decision. It was too draconian. He actually told Congress in testimony last year, straight up that it did a mistake.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that with everything you just described, that happened in October of 2020, there was actually more attention paid to this story about Hunter Biden's laptop than there would've been if Twitter had just let the links continue and the New York post's own posts on Twitter continue?

Michael Grynbaum: What's interesting, and we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves, but in the files that came out over the last few days, these internal documents at Twitter that give some backstory to this decision-making, there was a Democratic congressman, a clear Biden champion, who had very little interest in supporting Trump.

This congressman actually sent a note to Twitter's executive team saying that by censoring the article and generating this entire discussion over First Amendment and free speech on social media platforms, it had actually magnified the impact of it and that there was now an entirely side conversation going on all about the merits of whether conservative news outlets were being deprived of their First Amendment rights.

There was a huge much wider national interest in the contents of this laptop. Did it show something untoward about Hunter Biden's business dealings, and that Twitter had merely treated it like it would've any other news story. It's hard to say, but it might have come and gone the way that many news articles do.

Brian Lehrer: Trump's post that the Constitution should be suspended to cancel the 2020 election, that was about this even though that article got more play to the public in general than it would've without this Twitter firestorm.

Michael Grynbaum: What's so fascinating, and Brian, I think maybe the reason we're even talking about it today is that Twitter, for whatever reason, has this unique role in our political universe, certainly in our media universe, it's this Hothouse. It's been this defacto town square for over a decade now where I realize it's a tri-term, but I'll use the term the chattering classes convene to hash out issues of the day to debate what becomes the conventional wisdom of the media and political world. There can be this odd sense of ownership over the platform by its more dedicated users.

I think that's why Elon Musk's acquisition of the company and now his pledge, I suppose, to change the way that the platform works to make it more freewheeling, allow more voices on there from different groups that, for instance, white supremacist groups that had been removed from the platform in the past. I think that's why this whole debate has brought up such strong emotions and passions and why the discourse about it has risen to the level it has.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. By the way, listener, use this Twitter to write to us. If the former hashtag fake president got his way and the constitution was suspended, would gun nuts lose their right to be armed to the teeth? We'll keep that as rhetorical question since that's probably not the part of the constitution the president would try to suspend.

Listeners, where do you think Twitter to the central question that Michael Grynbaum, New York Times media correspondent was just framing, where do you think Twitter, in any social media platform, should draw the line between free speech and blocking false information that could have serious consequences? 212-433-WNYC, or any other kind of information that could have serious negative consequences or maybe even based on the source of that information.

Like in this case if it was from a stolen laptop or a hack laptop or anything related specifically to Musk's release now of internal Twitter documents about how it handled the New York Post Hunter Biden story in the 2020 campaign or Musk's responsibility or irresponsibility as Twitter's new Chief Stewart in general, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or Tweet @BrianLehrer.

Also, listeners, you can say if you are one of the million-plus people who have apparently quit Twitter over Musk's behavior or if you've decided to stay, many people with progressive credentials are announcing they will stay because of communities they're part of there, or to keep engaging with the public on a platform that a lot of people use and engaging with important influencers even if they don't approve of Musk, but others are leaving.

How are you deciding for yourself? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. To pick up the thread, Michael, this past Friday, Elon Musk announced that he would release internal Twitter company documents about that decision from 2020 on the New York Post story, the implication being that the old Twitter management censored reporting that could hurt Biden and help Trump and that that could reflect bias, not just journalistic standards or deliberations on standards of behavior. Have you now seen those internal documents?

Michael Grynbaum: Well, we've seen the documents that, let me back up and say that Musk, who now has access to these documents because of his purchase of the company, he has chosen so far two journalists to which he's distributed the documents and essentially, entrusted them with the initial public reporting. One of those journalists is Matt Taibbi who is a veteran independent investigative reporter who, for many years, really was a major voice of the American political left.

Your listeners probably might remember him from a free decor article about Goldman Sachs and the Wake of the Great Recession where he referred to the bank as a vampire squid. Now, Taibbi, over the Trump era, I put in my article that his fan base shifted. He still has quite a large following. His commentary about the Trump administration often diverged from the views of a lot of mainstream Democrats.

He was very skeptical from the start about claims of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and other issues like that. He's also become a major avatar of the complaint that big tech companies like Twitter have essentially enforced a liberal worldview and have been hostile to the voices of conservatives and those on the right wing. The other journalist is Bari Weiss, who is a former editor and writer at the New York Times. She left the paper, resigned from the paper a few years ago and started a substack site called Common Sense which also build itself as an independent outlet. I think--

Brian Lehrer: Right. Leaning Weiss for context, but go ahead.

Michael Grynbaum: I think that the reason I'm spending some time on that is to say that these journals and debates are very much part and parcel of what happened over the last few days. Clearly, Musk did not want a mainstream large corporate news organization to be the vessel to assess these documents.

In fact, he complained over the weekend that this has not gotten enough coverage in major news organizations. He said that reporters were pretending it was a nothing burger, was the phrase that he used. I should say that us at the New York Times did request access to all the documents ourselves so we could make an independent assessment but we did not hear back from Twitter. So far the documents are really just available to an extremely small group of observers.

Brian Lehrer: Matt in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Matt. Thanks for calling in.

Matt: Oh, hey, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I'm calling about-- You were talking about where a line should be drawn. One place I personally feel strongly about is the idea of defining misinformation and disinformation as somehow not free speech. Now, if I understand the Constitution right, they've always been free speech. Again, Twitter's a private company.

There's this whole new issue of should Twitter be considered the public square which I guess is going to be hammered out, but I'm just always troubled about people saying we have to stop misinformation, disinformation that's free speech, adults, and people, it's up to them to figure out what's true not some nanny to listen to it first and then read it first and say, if you can see it because they've decided whether it's misinformation, misinformation but it's fully free speech to lie. It's so strange in our society, we're having a problem with this in this country, in my opinion. That was my point.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, thank you very much. Who would talk back to Matt and argue the other side of that? Certainly, you understand where he's coming from, Michael, that and it's what Twitter originally said about itself, I think, we're just a platform. We're like the soapbox on the street corner where anybody can get up and say anything they want. They are allowed to lie, but user, beware.

Michael Grynbaum: Matt, I think you laid out the issue the battlegrounds, or that issue exceptionally well. What is misinformation? What is disinformation? Who defines that? A lot of what we're seeing, the backdrop to this whole discussion we're having is the end of gatekeepers in our media and in a lot of ways more broadly in our society. They're always used to be a filter as it were for the information that most of the public heard. I think the files that did come out and we haven't actually talked about what's in them.

The files were presented by Elon Musk as evidence of this rank, I should say, framed by him as evidence of censorship of a pernicious influence of the left on Twitter executives saying that they came under pressure to suppress this report. There's another interpretation when I read the files, which, essentially, is a discussion among Twitter executives of how to handle this very complex situation. You have a unconfirmed report, maybe it's based on hack materials, maybe it isn't.

We're in the last few weeks of a hugely polarizing presidential campaign. It actually reminded me of the conversation that I've either been a part of or overheard in my many years at the New York Times. It's very hard to make these editorial decisions. Assessing information, assessing whether or not it's responsible to relay it to a much broader audience is very much a part of, I guess, I should say, the art of journalism because it's less science than it is in art. Sympathy's not the right word but I guess recognition would be the word when I read these debates among the business executives of Twitter, content moderation. They were trying to be editors, and that is a very difficult thing to do.

Brian Lehrer: You reported in your story that even some Arden critics of Twitter were less impressed than Musk with these documents saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop. Who were some of those Twitter critics and tell us more about the earnest deliberations that they perceived.

Michael Grynbaum: I guess one interesting example was, these files which were initially reported by Matt Taibbi, the journalist I mentioned before, they came out Friday afternoon. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host on his program Friday evening picked up on this report, he called it, and I'll quote, "The document show a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history." Now, Carlson is someone who has been beating this drum for many, many months.

That liberals type of speech that the big tech platforms are autocratic, I guess, in their decisions on what is allowed to be disseminated on their platforms but one of his guests was Miranda Devine, who is a New York Post columnist, who is certainly on the right wing of the political equation. She said on air that these documents they were not a smoking gun.

She said that although she supported the release of more information from behind the scenes of Twitter, she basically conceded that this had been overhyped and that the suggestion that this particular evidence revealed a conspiracy at the highest levels of the company, didn't quite reach that threshold. That was an interesting divide that played out on the airways of Fox News pretty much in real-time in the wake of the release of these documents.

Brian Lehrer: Desiree, in Park Slope, you're on WNYC. Hi, Desiree.

Desiree: Hi, Brian, and your guest. I just wanted to say something that, ever New Yorker we are very used to having different kinds of people shouting information at us that may or may not be true on the subway, on the corner, on the soapbox as you're walking along the street. I think that instead of continuing to expect private companies who own these social media platforms to be the gatekeepers of information, we should be encouraging users of these platforms to develop information literacy skills.

I'm a librarian. I've taught information literacy skills to adults, to young people and I think that the media and the pundits, anyone who is talking about misinformation and disinformation, should be talking about how we can train each other to be better at discerning what is or isn't an authoritative source and following things back to their original source. That, to me, is much more powerful than expecting whoever owns Twitter to be the person to say, "This is not true. This is true. This is good information, this is bad information."

Brian Lehrer: Some of the [crosstalk] pushback against that, Desiree, might be that that model works in theory in a relatively well-informed or relatively engaged with multiple sources kind of public but a lot of people are not. If there's a lot of hate speech, for example, against one group or another, and then we see more instances of violence against that group, or if information gets out that really does flip an election that's based on false information or being disseminated by Russia to pollute our politics or whatever, then those realities in the real world give a platform like Twitter more responsibility than just trying to educate the public about being media literate. What would you say to that?

Desiree: I would say that, as individual adults living in the United States, it is our duty and responsibility to be well-informed, and we can do that on our own if we know how. Obviously, Twitter and Facebook, and Instagram are not able to do what we are expecting them to do, which is to vet out bad information. It's like whack-a-mole. You find one thing, you cancel this person's account, here's five more, that's one of the reasons why bots have such an impact.

I just strongly believe that if we want to have a long-lasting effect, we shouldn't underestimate the ability of adults in the US whether they are academic adults or a regular adult who's not part of academia to be able to discern information that is true or not. People have to do that every day in their lives.

Brian Lehrer: Desiree, thank you so much. We'll continue in a minute with New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum. More on this, more on who's leaving Twitter and who's not, and his article after election day on a Rare Win for MSNBC and the ratings, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum on these latest developments circling around Twitter and the responsibility of the platform either to provide free speech to multiple points of view or to block things that are clearly disinformation or dangerous. Interesting that most of the callers on our board, Michael, here in what is mostly progressive and at least anti-Trump and skeptical of Musk, New York.

Most of the callers on our board, though it's thoroughly unscientific as a poll, are calling in to say, "Hey, it's free speech," like our last caller. I could go down the list. I'm not because the point has been made but people are saying it is not up to some elite in a corporate suite or the government to say what somebody should be able to post on a platform like Twitter. Interesting.

Michael Grynbaum: I think that defaulting to more speech being better is a pretty common point of view. We should point out by the way that Twitter does not fundamentally have a 1st Amendment responsibility to allow any voices on its platform. It's a privately owned company. If someone feels they can't express themselves there, there are other venues and other places to put out their points of view.

I think that sometimes this discussion gets fuzzy because there's a claim that there's an absolute right to the 1st Amendment for users of what is essentially a private company's product but that's said, as we noted, it does play this, I guess, privilege role in the public discourse. I think the fact that Jack Dorsey, the former CEO later came to regret this decision that he felt it had been an overreaction, that to go so far as to stifle any links in any discussion about this article published in a major New York City newspaper, it felt heavy-handed. It felt just a step too far. I think it's quite notable that he did come to that conclusion.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I want to acknowledge some tweets that are coming in that are objecting, I guess rightly to the way I've been characterizing what Trump tweeted about this. I've been saying since I read the original or not tweeted but posted on his own social media site, I've been saying that he, controversial enough, is calling for suspending the Constitution, because of allegedly how Twitter biased the electorate in favor of Joe Biden but it's stronger than the word suspended, as people are saying to me, "Don't water it down."

That's right because what Trump really wrote on his social media platform was, "A massive fraud of this type of magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles even those found in the Constitution." Yes, not suspension, but termination of the Constitution where Trump's own words the other day, leading Mitch McConnell among others to say, "How could he ever be sworn in as president again?" Because in the oath you promised to uphold the Constitution, and here he is calling to terminate the Constitution.

To be clear and not water it down. Can you put into words, Michael, the standards that Twitter was trying to establish in 2020 and how Musk in these first weeks of owning Twitter has begun to change them. Musk has called himself a free speech absolutist but has also said, "Twitter obviously cannot become a free for all hellscape or anything can be said with no consequences". What's actually changing?

Michael Grynbaum: In the documents that were disclosed there's a lot of discussion about Twitter's internal policy about hacked materials. The initial decision to stifle the New York Post report was because there was some suspicion at the time that the information from the laptop had been obtained through illegal or [unintelligible 00:30:50] and so that was the internal rationale.

To what Musk is changing there, I would go back to the point about the difference between being a business person and being a journalist or an editor. Musk has called himself the first amendment absolutist. He has pledged to open up this platform which his fans have been thrilled about. Twitter should be free. We all gain when all voices are allowed. In practice, that is a much stickier, much more difficult proposition.

You mentioned users who are abandoning Twitter. Part of the reason is because they find the platform overrun net times with racist voices, white supremacist voices trolls people who are posting revenge porn. All these manner of of ill uses of the platform crop up when you throw away the tools of content moderation and preventing it from, I guess, in his words, becoming a hellscape. Again, when you actually take control of something, I think some of these issues that are very Black and white from an outsider's perspective, the actual implementation of them becomes very, very complex. I think we're seeing Musk deal with that in real time.

Brian Lehrer: Victoria in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria: Hi, how are you, Brian? Thanks for having me on and I love this discussion I've been talking about with friends for a long time. I am in the knowledge business. I'm a communicator. I'm working on climate change and clean energy issues and the energy Twitter and what is on Twitter just brings me joy every day in terms of being able to engage with other folks in who are in the energy world about what's going on and what does this technology mean?

Also, just even last night in the Warnock/Walker election there was information that made me feel confident that the right result which was frankly worn off was going to come in earlier than the New York Times or AP or others were ready to declare. It just gave me an opportunity to have a more relaxing evening than some of my friends were watching cable television too much. I just want to say that Twitter as a Jew there's definitely more hate on there.

I don't personally see it but I believe what others are documenting and Twitter, I've been using it for years. It brings joy to my life and it would be hard for me to figure out how to do my job without Twitter at this point even under the current circumstances of the new CEO and his very doctrinaire way of conducting the site.

Brian Lehrer: Victoria, thank you very much. I've already mentioned on this show this week the excellent edition of Kai Wright show Notes from America on Sunday night. I'm sure some of you listening now heard it but he had two guests who certainly are not from the political right, certainly are critics of Elon Musk and certainly are critics of Donald Trump, I would imagine. Were saying they were going to stay on Twitter because of the community that they've been able to find in various direct connections with a lot of kinds of people.

Victoria was giving her examples and for them, it was LGBTQ Twitter, it was Black Twitter, communities that are hard to find a lot of people in the physical world or let's say as many people in the physical world to engage in, to create power with and to talk about things that the mainstream media doesn't cover very much. Michael, who is leaving Twitter?

Michael Grynbaum: Well, I think there is been quite a lot of discussion about the rise in anti-Semitic content and I think there was a study that came out I don't have it right in front of me but a couple weeks ago that the quantity of hate speech has skyrocketed since Musk's takeover. I think there are some users who simply don't want to wade into that morass. They don't want to have their timeline filled with that garbage talk all day every day.

I have found that despite the reports, I'll botch the Mark Twain line if I try to remember it. Despite the reports of Twitter's demise and there was a night a few weeks ago where everyone seemed to be putting out eulogies for the platform it still seems to be going strong, journalists and politicians and academics, and thought leaders are still involved in the discussion. It's unclear to me whether the platform will actually fall away as your caller mentioned.

Brian Lehrer: Fall away or become right-wing social media while other things rise as more left-wing social media, you don't see that happening or you don't know yet.

Michael Grynbaum: I think right now, there isn't an agreed-upon alternative and I think until that happens, all the utilities of Twitter, the usefulness of it will continue to outweigh the concerns and the doubts.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go let me just touch briefly on one other recent story of yours. Just after election night last month, you wrote one with the headline a rare win for MSNBC over CNN in the election night ratings battle. What happened that was rare?

Michael Grynbaum: MSNBC was watched by more viewers on election night than CNN for the first time. This is both midterm election nights and presidential election nights. It was seen as a shock particularly because CNN is going through a very tempestuous moment with the new president layoffs, new corporate ownership.

I should note, which I actually think was quite relevant, was that Wolf Blitzer, for the first time in 20 years, was not leading CNN's election night coverage. He was taken off in favor of Jake Tapper and I suspect a lot of viewers turned on their TV expecting to see Wolf Blitzer who embodies election night in America and he wasn't there and I'm not sure whether that may have impact.

Brian Lehrer: Does Fox lead the pack on election returns and in primetime generally among the news channels?

Michael Grynbaum: It does, absolutely. I'm glad you mentioned that. When we talk about the battle between CNN and MSNBC, it's really the battle over second place. Fox News far and away is the highest-rated cable news network and it almost always has the highest viewership on an election night.

Brian Lehrer: What does any of that say about who we are as a country because the Republican Party seem to do less well in real life than Fox does on television relatively witnessed the Warnock victory last night no matter what cable channel or social media platform you've got that news on.

Michael Grynbaum: As many media observers will tell you a traditional television news ratings it's not wholly representative. First of all those who watch cable news tend to be much older. It tends to be people age 55 and up who are more dependent on traditional cable TV. I'll also note that if you look across the television news landscape, there are Fox which often caters to a conservative-leaning audience. There really are not a lot of alternatives for that audience.

There are places like Newsmax those are much smaller networks whereas let's take I don't know a moderate viewer they might find something to like on CBS or NBC or CNN. There's a lot of different places for them to go. I think that there are a lot of right viewers who think Fox is really the only network where they think their side of things will get a fair shake and that can often account for the concentration of viewership.

Brian Lehrer: It's still a minority of viewers compared to all the networks that are trying to do straight news or MSNBC is a more liberal network. Fox is still clearly outnumbered. It's just the biggest in its category. All right, we leave it there with Michael Grynbaum, media correspondent for the New York Times. Michael, thank you so much.

Michael Grynbaum: Thanks, Brian, it's great to be on.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer in WNYC and much more to come.

 

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