Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a tale of rate limiting, misinterpreted screenshots, and how half the internet lost its mind over a pretty standard Twitter error. This error was then interpreted through an extremely partisan political prism, leading previous arguments to flip political sides based on who was involved.
The desire to attack editorial discretion knows no political bounds. Partisan attacks on free speech seem to flip the second the players switch.
I think it’s become pretty clear over the past couple of years that I’m no fan of how Elon Musk runs ExTwitter. He makes terrible decision after terrible decision. Indeed, he seems to have a knack for doing the wrong thing pretty consistently.
But this week there’s been a hubbub of anger and nonsense that I think is totally unfair to Musk and ExTwitter. Musk did come out in support of Donald Trump a couple weeks back and has gone quite far in making sure that everyone on the platform is bombarded with pro-Trump messages. I already called out the hypocrisy of GOP lawmakers who attacked the former management of Twitter for “bias” as they did way, way less than that.
But, as you might have heard, on Sunday Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race and effectively handed his spot over to Kamala Harris. The “@BidenHQ” account on ExTwitter was renamed and rebranded “@HarrisHQ.” Not surprisingly, a bunch of users on the site clicked to follow the account.
At some point on Monday, some people received a “rate limiting” error message, telling them that the user was “unable to follow more people at this time.”
Lots of people quickly jumped to the conclusion that Musk was deliberately blocking people from following Harris. And, yes, I totally understand the instinct to believe that, but there’s little to suggest that’s actually what happened.
First off, rate limiting is a very frequently used tool in trust & safety efforts to try to stop certain types of bad behavior (often spamming). And it’s likely that ExTwitter has some sort of (probably shoddily done) rate limiting tool that kicks in if any particular account suddenly gets a flood of new followers.
Having an account — especially an older account that changes names — suddenly get a large flood of new followers is a pattern consistent with spam accounts (often a spammer will somehow take over an old account, change the name, and then flood it with bot followers). It’s likely that, to combat that, ExTwitter has systems that kick in after a certain point and rate limit the followers.
The message which blames the follower might just be shoddy programming on ExTwitter’s part. Or it might be because part of the “signal” found in this pattern is that when a ton of accounts follow an old account like this, it often means all those follower accounts are now being flagged as potential bots (again, spam accounts flood newly obtained accounts with bot followers).
In other words, these rate limiting messages are entirely consistent with normal trust & safety automated systems.
Of course, most users immediately assumed the worst. Many posted their screenshots and insisted it was Musk putting his thumb on the scales. The New Republic (which is usually better than this) rushed in with an article where at least the headline suggests Musk is doing this intentionally: “Trump-Lover Elon Musk Is Already Causing Kamala Harris Problems.”
Then, some site called The Daily Boulder (?!?) made it worse by misinterpreting a tweet by Musk as supposedly admitting to doing something. The Daily Boulder report is very misleading in multiple ways. First, it falsely states that users trying to follow Harris got a “something went wrong” error, when they actually got the rate limiting error shown above. The “something went wrong” error was from something else.
After the @BidenHQ account was changed to @HarrisHQ, if you tried to go directly to @BidenHQ, rather than redirect, Twitter just showed an error message saying “Something went wrong.” Elon screenshotted that and said “Sure did.”
This is a joke. Musk is joking that “something went wrong” with Joe Biden and/or the Biden campaign. Not that something went wrong with anyone trying to follow the Harris campaign.
The Daily Boulder piece confused the two different error messages. It seemed to think (incorrectly) that the screenshot Musk posted was of the Harris campaign account when it was the Biden one (I get that this is a bit confusing because the Biden account became the Harris account, but they don’t “redirect” if you go straight to the old name).
Either way, tons of Harris supporters flipped out and insisted that Musk was up to no good and was interfering. And, as much as I think Musk would have no issue doing something, nothing in this suggests anything done deliberately (indeed, I’ve tried to follow/unfollow/refollow the HarrisHQ account multiple times since Monday with no problem).
Still, Democrat Jerry Nadler has already called for an investigation, making him no better than Jim Jordan. Tragically, that NBC article fails to link to Nadler’s actual letter, leaving me to do their work for them. Here it is.
The letter is addressed to Jim Jordan, asking him to investigate this issue. That’s because Jordan is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler is the top Democrat on the committee but is effectively powerless without Jordan’s approval. The most charitable version of this is that Nadler is trolling Jordan, given all of Jordan’s hearings insisting that bias in the other direction was obviously illegal but his unwillingness to do so when bias is on the other foot.
Indeed, some of the letter directly calls out Jordan’s older statements when the accusations went in the other direction:
If true, such action would amount to egregious censorship based on political and viewpoint discrimination—issues that this Committee clearly has taken very seriously.
As you have aptly recognized in the past: “Big Tech’s role in shaping national and international public discourse today is well-known.” Against this import, you have criticized tech platforms for alleged political discrimination. As you wrote in letters to several “Big Tech” companies: “In some cases, Big Tech’s ‘heavy-handed censorship’ has been ‘use[d] to silence prominent voices’ and to ‘stifle views that disagree with the prevailing progressive consensus.’” In your view, platform censorship is particularly harmful to the American public because, “[b]y suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits.” Ironically, X’s CEO Elon Musk himself has expressed similar sentiment: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
Given your long track record of fighting against political discrimination on the platform “town squares” of American discourse, I trust that you will join me in requesting additional information from X regarding this apparent censorship of a candidate for President of the United States. The Committee should immediately launch an investigation and request at a minimum the following information from X.
But still, even if you’re trolling, Congress shouldn’t be investigating any company for their editorial choices. The answer to this weaponization of the government should not be even more weaponization of the government.
Which brings us to the final point in all of this. Even if it were true that Musk were doing this deliberately (and, again, there is no evidence to support that), it would totally be within his and ExTwitter’s First Amendment rights to do so.
I understand this upsets some people, but if it upsets you, think back to how you felt when Twitter banned Donald Trump. If you’re mad about this, I’m guessing there’s a pretty high likelihood you supported that move, right? That was also protected by the First Amendment. Platforms have First Amendment rights over who they associate with and who they platform. Twitter could choose to remove President Trump. ExTwitter could choose to remove or block the Harris campaign.
That’s how freedom works.
And to answer one other point that I saw a few people raise, no, this also would not be an “in kind contribution” potentially violating election law. We already went through this a few years back when the GOP whined that Google was giving Democrats in-kind contributions by filtering more GOP fundraiser emails to spam (based on their own misreading of a study). Both the FEC and the courts pointed out that this was not an in-kind contribution and was not illegal. The court pointed out that such filtering is clearly protected under Section 230.
The same is true here.
It’s fine to point out that this is a dumb way to handle issues. Or that ExTwitter should have made sure that people could follow the newly dubbed HarrisHQ account. But I haven’t seen anything that looks out of the ordinary, and I think people’s willingness to leap to the worst possible explanation for anything Musk related has gone too far here.
But even worse is Nadler’s call for an investigation. Even if it was just to mock Jordan’s other investigations, there’s no reason to justify such nonsense with more nonsense.
