ELI LAKE: American Nomenklatura.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

The unspooling of Twitter’s secrets—in a series of long Twitter threads—has been revelatory for many reasons. It turns out that despite armies of human content moderators, artificial-intelligence tools to weed out everything from health misinformation to hate speech, and an expanding set of internal rules, a handful of senior executives still made the most consequential decisions on what Twitter’s users were allowed to see.

You’ll never guess which way they all lean.