Hey Elon: Where Are The Twitter Files On Kevin McCarthy Pressuring Twitter To Reinstate MTG?

This week, the NY Times had an article detailing how House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has formed a close bond with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a situation that many thought was impossible just a couple years ago when McCarthy seemed to see Greene as a shameful example of the modern Republican party's infatuation with conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and nonsense.

The details of that article aren't all that interesting for Techdirt, but there is one paragraph that certainly caught my attention:

Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform's coronavirus misinformation policy.

Later in the article, there are more details:

And by early 2022, Ms. Greene had begun to believe that Mr. McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Ms. Greene raced to Mr. McCarthy's office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Instead of telling Ms. Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, Mr. McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Ms. Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Ms. Greene's case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.

Now, let's be clear: this is perfectly reasonable (as we've been describing) for politicians to state a case in favor of a certain course of action by platforms. It only reaches the problematic level when there is coercion involved.

But some folks, including in our comments, have been insisting that any interaction by any government official is automatically coercive. And, while I'm guessing they will argue here that this is different," because it was about reinstating an account, rather than taking one down, the simple fact remains, that it was government officials seeking to influence a moderation policy decision by a private company, effectively trying to sway that company's own 1st Amendment protected right to decide for itself how to moderate.

The simple fact is that politicians on both sides of the aisle regularly are trying to influence how moderation occurs (often in contrasting ways). They're allowed to try to persuade companies to act how they want, so long as there are no coercive elements there.

But, either way, this does go to reinforce the idea that the Twitter Files" are simply cherry picking stories to suit their own political narrative, and apparently leaving out stories like this, where it was a high ranking Republican trying to influence a moderation decision.