Twitter files prove government was 'in the censorship business in a huge way': Matt Taibbi
'Griftopia' author Matt Taibbi sounds off on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on what he's learned through releasing Elon Musk's Twitter files.
Imagine the scene in the FBI’s San Francisco office last November 6.
"Boss! HQ just called. There’s misinformation about the election on Twitter!"
"We’re on it. Agent Chan, I need Billy Baldwin’s location data, and I need it yesterday!"
Twitter owner Elon Musk’s ongoing release of the "Twitter Files" is exposing the horrifying and absurd level of government involvement—from intelligence agencies to legislators—in shaping narratives through censorship on social media around issues like elections and COVID-19. Most of the coverage rightly focuses on the moral (and possibly legal) scandal this represents.
TWITTER FILES PUBLISHER SAYS GOVERNMENT WAS IN THE CENSORSHIP BUSINESS 'IN A HUGE WAY'
Officials always demand the power to censor in the name of the greater good, and they always abuse it for their own gain. But it’s also worth taking a moment to realize just how bad these censors are, and have always been, at the job they claim they are doing: making sure nobody reads or hears "harmful" or "inaccurate" information.
History is replete with these failures: Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, and Mandela were killed or imprisoned for saying things the authorities of the time thought were false, harmful, or both. (And we never heard their ideas again. Oops.)
Today’s censors are at least as incompetent as those throughout history. As Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi points out, of the list of 25 "misinformation"-spreading accounts that included the unfortunate Baldwin brother, many "were satirical in nature," and "nearly all —with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork — were relatively low engagement."
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Even assuming you believe the feds should be cracking down on Twitter badthink, do you really think it’s a priority two days before an election to try to prevent people from being misled by user @Ronsmit49336969? (Current followers:13.)
That said, Twitter probably appreciated the relative selectivity of that list. In May 2020, the State Department sent Twitter a list of 5,500 accounts as a sample of their larger database of 250,000 supposedly suspicious accounts that seemed "inorganic" and followed two or more Chinese diplomats, which included users from CNN and the Canadian military.
Closer to the 2020 election, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests to examine accounts for policy violations, sending email after email attaching spreadsheets with supposed violators.
Competent censors would have realized that sending so much information to the overburdened company was a recipe for paralysis from employees begging for guidance as to what to censor first. As Twitter lawyer Stacia Cardille wrote about two weeks before the 2020 election, "Is there some way we can figure out an accommodation to prioritize the reports we escalate?"
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It’s not as though the 80 FBI agents tasked to police social media were burying Twitter in secret information from some INTERPOL database. As Cardille observed, "They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations." Your tax dollars at work.
Were their decisions at least correct? Nope.
On easy issues, like the date of Election Day, they might have been fairly reliable, but so is asking some guy off the street. And as has always been true with censors, jokes and satire escape them completely, as with this flagged tweet from @byrum_wade (6 followers): "Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9th."
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COVID-19 was another hot spot of error. Early on, the Trump administration asked for Twitter’s help quelling "misinformation" about panic buying at grocery stores, but as journalist David Zweig pointed out, there were runs on grocery stores.
In August 2022, a reply tweet citing CDC data to prove that COVID was not the leading cause of death in children (it wasn’t) was labeled misinformation, with replies and likes disabled to prevent spread. The tweet to which it was replying, which actually was wrong, was left alone. Examples like this are legion. And to handle the demand, Twitter turned to overseas contractors to referee complicated medical discussions — with predictable results.
And then there’s Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Reporting on this infamously got the New York Post banned from Twitter for the policy violation of reporting on "hacked materials" — but no hacking occurred. ‘
We now know that Twitter "bought into a wild hack-and-dump story" that Biden’s embarrassing data was stolen through hacking (probably by Russians), loaded onto a laptop, and then planted at a Delaware computer store.
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This Rube Goldberg story was highly dubious even at the time. If you accept that the high-stakes decision to censor this story wasn’t politically motivated, you have to accept that the censors got it incredibly wrong.
Most Americans, thankfully, consider this kind of censorship to be morally wrong. Those who nevertheless continue to defend or embrace it, whether in Big Tech or government, owe it to the rest of us to explain why the people they get to do the dirty work always fail so miserably.
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