Matt Taibbi opened the series on December 2, 2022, with Twitter’s October 2020 handling of the New York Post laptop story. [1] Bari Weiss followed on December 8 with “visibility filtering” and named account labels. [2] Then came the Trump suspension, split across three writers: Taibbi on October 2020 to January 6 (Part 3), Michael Shellenberger on January 7 (Part 4) and Weiss on January 8 (Part 5). [3][4][5]
The second week shifted to government. Taibbi’s Part 6 described FBI flagging of mostly small accounts, some plainly joking. [6] Shellenberger’s Part 7 returned to the laptop through the FBI’s 2020 hack-and-leak briefings and noted a $3.4 million reimbursement. [7] Lee Fang’s Part 8 documented Twitter’s special handling of U.S. Central Command accounts used in covert influence work. [8] Taibbi’s Part 9 covered contacts with other agencies, and David Zweig’s Part 10 covered COVID moderation. [9][10]
All of it was published as Twitter threads, by writers Musk chose. Taibbi said he agreed to undisclosed conditions; Weiss said the only one she accepted was publishing first on Twitter. Musk said he had not read the documents before the writers did. [11] Alex Berenson and Paul D. Thacker were later given material too. [11] These details matter because they define what the series is: a curated reading of an archive outsiders still cannot search.
