What to make of the Twitter Files?

“Twitter”, Elon Musk wrote on December 10th, on the website he owns and runs, “is both a social-media company and a crime scene”. Mr Musk’s crime scene is described in the “Twitter Files”, a set of screenshots of the social-media company’s internal communications. They were taken mostly from Slack, a workplace messaging app, and given to three freelance journalists by Twitter’s current staff, at Mr Musk’s direction. They relate to moderation decisions taken by Twitter before Mr Musk bought the company. The “Files” have been published in a hard-to-follow stream of at least 225 tweets over the past two weeks, the most recent set emerging on December 12th.