Every installment, every author

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.

Alex Berenson, himself suspended by Twitter in 2021, published a January 9, 2023 installment showing that Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner on Pfizer’s board, flagged a tweet by former Trump health official Brett Giroir about natural immunity to a Twitter policy contact. Twitter then labeled the tweet misleading. [1] In early January Taibbi also published the request from Adam Schiff’s office about journalist Paul Sperry and other accounts. [2]

On January 27 Taibbi turned to Hamilton 68, the “Russian bots” dashboard. [3] On March 2 he published Part 17 on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the lists of supposedly state-linked accounts that the GEC and groups it funded sent to Twitter. [4] On March 17 came Part 19, on Stanford’s Virality Project and its flagging of vaccine-related posts, including true stories it called potential “malinformation.” [5]

Andrew Lowenthal, an Australian former digital-rights NGO director, worked with Taibbi on the Virality Project parts and went on to map what the writers call the “censorship-industrial complex.” [6] Taibbi and Shellenberger summarized their findings under oath on March 9, 2023. [7]

In November 2023, Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Taibbi published the “CTIL Files.” These were documents from a whistleblower about the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, a volunteer group of security and former defense professionals that set up counter-disinformation work in 2020, including plans involving sock-puppet accounts and, the authors say, a partnership with CISA. [1] The documents are not Twitter records. The “Files” label covers different archives from different sources.

In April 2024 Shellenberger published “Twitter Files Brazil,” internal emails about demands from Brazil’s courts and election authority for user data and removals. They fed Musk’s public fight with Justice Alexandre de Moraes. [2] Shellenberger acknowledged he had the platform’s emails, not the court orders themselves. [3]

In 2026 Taibbi returned to the original material. An April 24 piece linked Twitter-era correspondence to the Southern Poverty Law Center days after its indictment, which he noted was still only unproven charges. [4] In July he and Dr. Matt Bivens, who had been in the room for the first releases, began publishing material they said was overlooked. Taibbi wrote that the team had worked fast, often did not understand what it was reading and “sometimes … just missed things.” [5]