"A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Wrote Donald Trump, at Truth Social, quoted in "White House rebukes Trump’s suggestion to suspend Constitution over 2020 election" (WaPo).

The post came a day after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed he would expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the run-up to the 2020 election. But his “Twitter Files” did not show that the tech giant bent to the will of Democrats. 

Trump's "truth" is so hyperbolic and disrespectful of the rule of law that it's idiotic clickbait, only worthy of attention because the man is running for President, and apparently, as polls go, the leading candidate. Sorry, I'm not going to spend every day agonizing over that. We will move on... I hope... I trust... He's so over-criticized that I don't see the point of jumping on him one more time. That doesn't work, and it drives some dedicated believers more deeply into his sphere.

I want to move on to the link in the indented quote — on "did not show" — which goes to "Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds/The company’s new chief executive detailed Twitter’s decision-making around a controversial story" (WaPo). 

Yesterday morning, I was critical of The Washington Post for not having an article on the "Twitter files," but by the end of the day, they had that. Let's read:

It was billed as a bombshell: Elon Musk, after rifling through his new company’s internal files, would finally expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the critical run up to the 2020 election....

A handful of screenshots from 2020, posted over the course of two hours Friday evening in a disjointed, roughly 40-tweet thread, show the San Francisco company debating a decision to restrict sharing of a controversial New York Post story about the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party....

In the process, Musk took the extraordinary step of promoting the leak of internal company communications to Taibbi, exposing the names of several rank-and-file workers and Khanna’s personal email address....

Musk and Taibbi both tweeted that they would reveal more information in a second chapter Saturday.

Yeah? What happened? I go to Twitter and see that last night Musk tweeted "Looks like we will need another day or so." I hope that means he/Taibbi are trying to incorporate the criticisms of the Friday tweet-dump and will make a clearer, cleaner presentation in Part 2.

Back to WaPo:

Musk [said in a Twitter Spaces audio chat Saturday afternoon] that he shared the documents with another Substack writer, Bari Weiss, and suggested he may share them with the public in the future.

Bari Weiss didn't want to do what Matt Taibbi did?

WaPo proceeds to put the Twitter files bombshell/"bombshell" in context, and I really appreciate this concise summary:

The spectacle capped off another week of chaos at Musk’s Twitter, after the “chief Twit” spent Friday afternoon meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and batting back reports about the rise of hate speech on the Twitter platform. He also attracted attention for suspending the rapper Ye, who had tweeted the image of a swastika combined with the Star of David. And the relaunch of a paid check mark system expected for Friday was delayed again, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the decision.

I still hadn't seen that swastika-with-a-Star-of-David image, and WaPo didn't reproduce it. I had to go looking and found it — here — at The Times of Israel. I had thought the swastika was stamping out the star, but I see that the 2 symbols have been interwoven in a way that makes it even harder to see how the image could be adjudged a direct incitement to imminent violence, which was Musk's reason for suspending Ye. 

From WaPo:

During the Twitter Spaces, Musk said, “I personally wanted to punch Kanye,” explaining how Ye’s swastika post was incitement to violence. He said he made the decision to suspend him.

So Musk is allowed to explicitly refer to violence — punching — but Ye gets suspended based on Musk's stretched inference. And are we still supposed to be celebrating Musk as a hero of fairness and freedom?

Musk’s “free speech” agenda has defined his tumultuous takeover of Twitter, as he has argued since the early days of the deal that the platform serve as a “de facto town square” where people are “able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” He has asserted that the company has a “strong left wing bias.” And in recent days, he has granted amnesty to a number of previously suspended accounts, including far-right influencers and people associated with the QAnon extremist ideology.

Though Musk has said he agrees with some Democratic Party and some Republican policies, he increasingly appears to be courting the GOP. In the run-up to the midterm elections, he encouraged his millions of followers to vote Republican. And he recently said he would lean toward backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in a potential 2024 presidential bid....

Yes, hold Musk's feet to the fire — metaphorically only! — if he wants to be the Czar of Free Speech. He'd better be scrupulously viewpoint neutral. It's got to be about our freedom, not his power and wealth.

Taibbi said that he had to “agree to certain conditions” in exchange for the opportunity to cover the files in a message to his Substack subscribers....

What were the conditions? Maybe Bari Weiss can tell us. 

The next section of the WaPo article recounts the Taibbi thread in detail and adding context. I'm not going to quote all of that. There's also, at the very end, a little bit about the response.

Tucker Carlson called it “one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of social media,” and the New York Post called it a “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell” in a headline....

But not everyone bought the "bombshell" spin.