Twitter Files: The Muzzling of Charlie Kirk

At a crucial juncture in the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Post used a tried-and-true method to pressure Twitter to remove Kirk

The New York Times obituary of Charlie Kirk, “Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Force and a Close Trump Ally, Dies at 31” will go down as an infamous entry in the genre for many reasons. It’s an obvious understatement/provocation to write “Dies at 31” in a headline about a man assassinated by rifle round to the neck. The Times also leaned on the worn trope of alleging racist or anti-Semitic comments without elucidating them (“He tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people”), a tendency that’s been common in coverage today. Then there was this:

Mr. Kirk rose even further into the conservative stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, when he was quick to attack the World Health Organization — which, in his typical fashion, he called the “Wuhan Health Organization” — accusing it of hiding the source of the Covid virus and claiming that it had emerged from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan. He later rallied opposition to school lockdowns and mask mandates.

He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies — he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in treating the virus, which it is not — that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.

The notion that Kirk was “so vocal” in his willingness to spread “unsupported claims and outright lies” that it led to his temporary banning on Twitter seemed a strange thing to emphasize in an obituary. The quote about hydroxychloroquine being “100 percent effective” notwithstanding, Kirk wasn’t wrong (or demonstrably wrong, anyway) to criticize the WHO, lockdowns, or mask mandates. The Times also likely should have been more circumspect about its own performance in contemporaneous stories like “For Charlie Kirk, Conservative Activist, the Virus is a Cudgel,” when the paper complained about his use of phrases like “China virus” and his tweeting of a list of pre-Covid diseases named after the location of the first cases (Zika, West Nile Virus, Ebola, etc). But was Kirk “muzzled by a liberal elite”?

According to Twitter Files documents, “muzzled” might be a strong word, but “targeted” would be accurate. One episode, in which an effort was made to remove Kirk and Benny Johnson just before the 2020 Presidential Election, stands out. Twitter understood this was a high-profile decision and copied the top executives in the firm, as well as Twitter’s “US GOV TEAM,” on its decision-making process. In the most damning sequence, Twitter went from having zero interest to actioning hundreds of accounts linked to Kirk within hours, after receiving a query from The Washington Post. Though the firm had a tough time linking Kirk himself to wrongdoing, he was recommended for removal, despite reservations by Trust and Safety executives. At the last minute, he was given a reprieve, only to be removed just before the election over a tweet about missing mail-in ballots.

In all, Twitter fielded at least three high-profile press queries about taking Kirk down just before the election, and one finally stuck. There’s no suggestion of an intelligence role, but it’s worth noting that a former CIA official was put in the “lead” of one of Kirk’s investigations: