Putting Twitter back in its box

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The Story

Several of the most popular journalists on Substack are currently publishing internal Twitter correspondence (#TwitterFiles - what else?) that apparently prove the company has secretly censored accounts.

Depending on your take, these ‘leaks’ (the journos have been given access by Elon Musk) are either a fake scandal that helps Musk purge the platform of moderation, or they are proof of a sinister plot by ‘woke’ social media to control how we think.

Well, a court ruling in Germany this week highlights how superficial some of these debates can be.

Twitter was taken to court by Michael Blume, the anti-Semitism commissioner for Baden-Württemberg, who complained that the company had been slow in deleting a series of defamatory tweets.

Some of the tweets accused him of “a closeness to paedophiles”, others of having an affair. Other tweets implied that he’d been involved in an “anti-Semitic scandal” and was “part of an anti-Semitic mob.”

After Blume hired a…