A few years ago, I sat in a small conference room at the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter with maybe a dozen other reporters, poring over thousands of emails and Slack messages from the people who ran the company before Elon Musk bought it. We were looking for evidence that there was a years-long, orchestrated campaign of political censorship on the platform, carried out at the behest of the US government. We found plenty. The screenshots and timelines of those communications became the Twitter Files.

The Twitter Files were part of the basis for the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. I was among several writers who co-signed an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs. The case laid out how the Biden administration, working through the tech platforms, had systematically censored people who dissented from the administration’s positions on Covid, the 2020 election, and other controversies.

I’m still friendly with everyone who was in that room, as far as I know. I have ongoing working relationships with several of them. I’m not interested in starting any professional or personal drama with anyone, so even though it’s easy enough to google at least some of those who were there, I’m not going to name anyone in particular at this moment. I still like and respect them all, and hopefully they like and respect me and will continue to after I hit publish on this post.

That said, it is amazing how few of the people who were in that room (which included others who, like me, were not bylined authors of any of the Twitter Files threads) have had anything to say about the attacks on free speech coming from the current administration. Some, I think it’s safe to say from what they’ve written and tweeted in the recent past, outright applaud it. I’ve felt like this needs to be said for a long time, but it’s reached a level of absurdity that I feel weirder not pointing it out than I feel anxious about potentially antagonizing a few friends and allies.