The story behind the Twitter files

Back in December, The Free Press was invited by Elon Musk to Twitter HQ, where we were given access to the company’s vast archive of internal communications.

In the weeks that followed, we broke stories—about the platform’s Trump’s ban, its secret blacklists, and its interference in the Covid debate—that revealed how a handful of unelected individuals at this private company put its thumb on the scale to manipulate the public discourse.

Those in the mainstream press, who didn’t ignore the Twitter Files altogether, had questions about exactly how this information got into our hands. Did Musk direct us in any way? Were we fed cherry-picked information? Why couldn’t we just release the entire data set to the public at once?

Now, for the first time, our reporters who were on the ground—Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Nellie Bowles—will answer these questions and more.