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Karl Salzmann: The IRS targeted journalist Matt Taibbi on two occasions while he was exposing information about censorship efforts by the government and Twitter. The agency launched an investigation into Taibbi, a liberal journalist who has criticized left-wing censorship of conservative and moderate voices, on December 24, 2022, according to a Wednesday letterfrom House Judiciary Committee […]
Michael Scherer “These operatives had the gall to say they were fighting to protect our democracy. In reality, they undermined it at every turn…” “… with frivolous lawsuits, character assassination, and outright lies designed to prevent No Labels from exercising our constitutional right to get ballot access. If you are wondering why Americans are losing […]
Matt Taibbi: The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia. Six months ago, when former Wikipedia […]
Collin Anderson: Over the past three months, an avowed left-wing organization has spent more than $9 million on Facebook ads boosting Vice President Kamala Harris and attacking former president Donald Trump. The spots have reached scores of swing state voters using a Facebook feature that allows advertisers to submit their own data—for political groups, that […]
Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker
Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker The British are coming, to meddle in our elections! In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties […]
Matt Taibbi: On November 20, 2022, 85% of Stanford University’s Faculty Senate voted to condemn Dr. Scott Atlas, a former chief of radiology at the Stanford University Medical Center who was serving on President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. The Stanford faculty pilloried Atlas for questioning the efficacy of state-enforced lockdowns, face masks, and […]
Matt Taibbi: “Most eveyone here has been censored.” Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennan’s, James Clapper’s, Mike McFall’s, and Rick Stengel’s who make up America’s self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, […]
Matt Taibbi: This is every amateur speaker’s dream, to follow Russell Brand. Thanks a lot, God! I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience. So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing! In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing […]
Matt Taibbi: The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated […]
Matt Taibbi: There’s no “vibe shift.” Having written bestselling books on criminal justice for blue-leaning audiences, I can attest: American liberalism’s trumpeting of “rights” always stopped at the border of whatever tony suburb or upscale city neighborhood it inhabited. While public defenders fought rights violations at peasant wages, wealthy Democrats in the privacy of voting […]
Matt Taibbi: The accounts you identified as pushing “Russian influence operations” actually belonged to people like Consortium editor Joe Lauria, Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas, and a onetime refugee from Lebanon named Sonia Monsour. None had any connection to Russia.
Matt Taibbi: This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities […]
Matt Taibbi: The “Border Czar” insanity has hit new depths. In the last 48 hours we’ve raced from denial to paradox, with head-scratching stops in between. In the first stage, “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Border Czar” became “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Bad Border Czar.” This is from the new Reuters piece, “Republicans call Harris a failed border czar. The […]
Matt Taibbi: So instead of if you search for let’s just say Trotskyism. Instead of getting the world’s leading Trotskyist website, which is the World Socialist Website, you will get it like a New York Times story about Trotskyism instead. They want to push you towards the “authoritative” source. But that’s subjective and again it’s […]
Balajj: Recall that after the Democrat primary ended on June 8, Obama very consciously put Biden on stage, let him stumble and mumble, and then held his hand[10] to usher him off stage. That was the act of a savvy politician: Obama was ostensibly appearing with Biden to help him, but was really there to […]
Mark Judge: Referencing one of those semi-regular and boring reports about the state of journalism, Noonan concludes with this: What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made […]
Matt Taibbi: Standing and the related “traceability” issue doom Murthy v. Missouri, as the Supreme Court votes 6-3 to kick the Internet censorship can down the road The Supreme Court today punted on Internet censorship, sending free speech advocates back to the drawing board while Joe Biden’s White House celebrated. “The Supreme Court’s decision,” said […]
By Julia Steinberg The Stanford Internet Observatory—a research center tasked with rooting out “misinformation” on social media—is shutting its doors. Chances are if you’ve heard of the SIO it was in a scathing piece from Michael Shellenberger or Matt Taibbi, who have accused the center of being a key node in the censorship-industrial complex. It was also my first […]
Shannon Bonds hourly news plug 15 June 2024 16:00ET: [short audio clip] Academic group studying disinformation is facing an uncertain future after political attacks. A campaign by Republicans is targeting research. NPRs Shannon Bond reports the Stanford Internet Observatory studies how social media platforms are abused. Its investigated thorny issues including child exploitation and the […]
Matt Taibbi Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said a person suspected of funding al-Qaeda and caught in the Philippines could be considered “part of the battlefield” and subject to indefinite detention without trial, which sounded a lot like Bushian legal theory. Similarly, when new Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if he agreed that a […]
Matt Taibbi: Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms. Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing […]
Jacob Sullum: Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.” According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that […]
Matt Taibbi: Last week, NPR senior editor Uri Berliner rattled the media world with a tell-all piece in The Free Press,“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” He detailed a series of problems, including what he described as a transition from a “liberal bent” to a more “knee-jerk, activist, [and] […]
Matt Taibbi: Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal […]
Matt Taibbi: I almost blew a top reading Brandy Zadrozny’s NBC piece that claimed it was “conspiracy theory” to suggest organizations like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) acted as “proxies” for government censorship. Three different groups — Twitter Files reporters, staffers for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee, and lawyers in the […]
Matt Taibbi: Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.
Matt Taibbi: Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the […]
Matt Taibbi: Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments […]
Sasha Stone “Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” ― John Steinbeck I wish I could say I always had the moral clarity of someone like Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald. But for most of my life, I didn’t. I was a devoted Democrat, a good soldier for the Left. […]
Matt Taibbi: After yesterday’s Racket story about misadventures with Google’s creepy new AI product, Gemini, I got a note about a Bloomberg story from earlier this week. From US Used AI to Help Find Middle East Targets for Airstrikes: The US used artificial intelligence to identify targets hit by air strikes in the Middle East this month, a defense official […]
MATT TAIBBI In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference. Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry […]
Matt Taibbi: Substack is under attack again. The crusade is led by a site contributor, Jonathan Katz, whose style might be characterized as embittered-conventional, i.e. toting the same opinions as every mainstream editorialist, only angrier about it. There’s been more of this genre on offer here as staff positions for talking-point-spouters dry up in legacy shops, […]
Matt Taibbi: Last March, right as Michael Shellenberger and I were preparing to testify in Washington about digital censorship, former NGO worker-turned-Racket-contributor Andrew Lowenthal found Twitter Files emails pertaining to something called the Virality Project. An analog to the earlier “Election Integrity Partnership” content-moderation program that worked with thr Department of Homeland Security and the […]
Matt Taibbi: “The whackadoodles, the cult members, the Fox News Snorters, there’s not that much we can do about them in the short term,” says longtime marketing executive Deb Lavoy, in the video above.
Matt Taibbi: The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?
Matt Taibbi: On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, “These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers,” a story about how “records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits” were wielded as “tools of harassment” against “scholars” in the “field of disinformation.” In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the […]
1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA: BIG BROTHER IS FLAGGING YOU New House report and previously unpublished Twitter Files show: Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was a front for government censorship pic.twitter.com/3db6sCOX7K — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 9, 2023
Matt Taibbi: If you read this morning’s Racket article about Senator Amy Klobuchar’s letter to Jeff Bezos asking for “proactive measures” to suppress sites like Substack or Rumble, you probably gathered I’m in a mood. I’ve had it. Whether it’s NewsGuard slapping “anti-US” labels on Joe Lauria and Consortium News, or Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron […]
Matt Taibbi: It’s one thing to have an “evolving” take on mask efficacy, and another to tell a lie or two to scare people into getting a shot. Bullying bad research into existence and pretending in perfect TV deadpan not to know the names of the researchers, all while hyping a bogus paper you helped […]
Matt Taibbi: When you know you’re being censored, you can protest. But what to do about silent editorial punishment, dished without announcement, by tech platforms that appear to be learning fast how to avoid public outcry? A year ago, this site had to throw a public fit to resolve a preposterous controversy involving videographer Matt […]
More. And. More. And. More.
Matt Taibbi: The Harpers piece doesn’t blame the United States for war in Ukraine, but does tell a story about a foreign policy establishment that wriggled free of our more conflict-averse late seventies and eighties, and created a new expansionism that eschews diplomacy and generates military confrontation almost by design. “Far from making the world safer by […]
Matt Taibbi: The federal government’s pro-censorship arguments seemed to take a hit in a contentious, fascinating hearing in New Orleans
Matt Taibbi: “[Judge] Willett put the mob analogy in even plainer language, saying the government’s behavior was a “fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming,” as in, “That’s a really nice social media platform you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”” more: that statements from White House officials about content like, “[I’m] […]
Matt Taibbi: Two sets of figures, collected four years apart by the research firm SSRS, for CNN: Plunging numbers for Trump prompted stories like, “Tldr: Trump’s in 2020 Trouble.” Biden headlines this week try to speak an upbeat narrative into reality, the most humorous probably being “Biden Heads West For a Policy Victory Lap” and […]
Jack Smith not only demanded access to Trump’s Twitter account, he demanded Twitter be barred from telling anyone about it for at least 6 months. Notice when these privacy-invading demands are made by countries such as Turkey, no one has any trouble decrying it as “authoritarian” pic.twitter.com/PwjpKg7Pza — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 9, 2023 "Why […]
Matt Taibbi: Incumbent Joe Biden not only has the lowest approval rating in history — he “shouldn’t” be this unpopular “but he is,” mused a mortified Washington Post — but as of Monday, when his son’s former partner Devon Archer testified in Congress, he appeared to be careening toward withdrawal due to impairment, scandal, or both. As […]
Matt Taibbi: Even before the news media business went fully off the rails in recent years, Reason always stood out as a publication unafraid to take unconventional stances or report on controversial issues. I’ve always been a fan, and was glad to get a chance at Freedom Fest in Memphis to sit down with the […]
Matt Taibbi: In one damning email, an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg: We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content. We see repeatedly in internal communications not only in the email above, but in the Twitter […]
Andrew Lowenthal and Matt Taibbi: Yesterday witnessed another bizarre display of cartoon authoritarianism on the part of the Democratic Party, as members beat up one of their own presidential candidates, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a hearing of the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Bezos is reportedly taking a direct interest […]
Matt Taibbi: When Public and Racket obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the scientists who published perhaps the most influential Nature Medicine paper about the origins of Covid-19, one of the first things we noticed was the scientists’ fixation with hits and Internet traffic. If Heathers had been written for the Instagram age, the […]
Matt Taibbi calls the covid origins cover up “perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality” Never forget pic.twitter.com/XRO4ygKckv — zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 19, 2023
MATT TAIBBI, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER Chats showing Proximal Origins authors saying things like “The truth will never come out (if lab escape is the truth)” were published first by independent researcher Francisco Del Asis of the independent investigatory group DRASTIC, after which the story was picked up by Ryan Grim of The Intercept. From there, health officials did […]
Martin Gurri: Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” […]
Matt Taibbi: A brief story sums up my theory of journalism: In 1991 I was trying to work as a freelance reporter in newly ex-communist St. Petersburg, Russia. I heard a hot rumor. After decades of deprivation, gorillas at the city zoo were to be given bananas. I thought Western editors would go crazy. I’d […]
Matt Taibbi: I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but since I’m persona non grata on Twitter these days and this material needs to get out in the wake of the ruling in the Missouri v. Biden internet censorship case, I’m invoking a political necessity exception to post #TwitterFiles emails that may […]
Chris Hedges: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into […]
Matt Taibbi: The country today is run by politicians who spend all their time telling us freedom is dangerous, and the press won’t go near the word unless it can wedge it into an act of self-flagellation, à la the Washington Post headline today: “How an enslaved genius saved the Capitol dome’s ‘Freedom’ statue.” The […]
Matt Taibbi: This is a very American thing, the idea that rights aren’t conferred, but a part of us, like our livers, and you can’t take them away without destroying who we are. That’s why in other contexts you’ll hear some of us say things like, “I’ll give you this gun when you pry it […]
This week on America This Week, the podcast I do with @mtaibbi, the featured story in the last segment will be Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. (Due to popular demand and all that.) It’s not long, so read up! Harrison Bergeron (Vonnegut) Full Text.pdf https://t.co/vmezBW6tsK — Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) June 16, 2023 Madison’s very well […]
Matt Taibbi: CNN had the gall the other day to run a story called, “Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship.” The plummeting cable network, which consistently refused to cover any of the Twitter Files revelations in real time, is citing a legal motion filed by Twitter that, shockingly, does not […]
Matt Taibbi: Rule #1: When you think you’re finished, go back and kill 20% of your copy. Soviet writer Isaac Babel, a fan of what the Dude called “the whole brevity thing,” said a key was using “strong fingers” and “whipcord nerves” to remove parts “you happen to like most, but are needed least.” Babel […]
Matt Taibbi: I read Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s “Eight Key Takeaways” summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten […]
Imagine a defendant telling the FBI — “Look, if I knew then what I know now, it wouldn’t have happened; I would have done things differently. Let’s just move on now, bro.” https://t.co/3pq8BpTHUL — Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) May 15, 2023 Ex-CIA head John Brennan, re Mueller report: “They found no conspiracy.” Brennan on MSNBC: […]
Mark Judge: Yet all three reporters themselves exemplify how the media have killed themselves over the last several years and why the rise of the internet and social media has stripped reporters of the credibility they used to have. The ink-stained wretches just can’t get away with anything anymore. The reporters Dowd interviews for her […]
Matt Taibbi: Following the release of today’s article about news organizations junking the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” reader Ben O’Neill made a good observation that should have been in the piece. In the newly-found summary emailed by an Aspen Institute figure in September 2020, “Partnership for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere,” the section about “hack-and-dump” exercises asks [emphasis […]
Matt Orfalea and Matt Taibbi: In a few cases, news organizations have already added editor’s notes as threads were released — we should commend Mother Jones for addingsuch updates to many of their articles which referenced Hamilton — which gave cause for optimism. Maybe we could convince other reporters and editors to make the corrections ahead of time. How […]
Matt Taibbi: That interview says it all, doesn’t it? Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win […]
Michael Shellenberger Ever since journalist Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress on April 10, critics of the Twitter Files have claimed that we were making a big deal about nothing. We were being paranoid, they said, to imagine that the U.S. government was involved in spying on ordinary Americans and demanding censorship. The various […]
How did @DrJillStein get on Twitter’s creepy “inferred Russians” list – a.k.a. is_russian? Read the new #TwitterFiles thread by @0rf: https://t.co/6eWOhYX33z — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 26, 2023
Matt Taibbi: Back from vacation I made the mistake of scanning the news and was shocked by the media’s ongoing orgy of self-congratulation and Two-Minutes-Hating, in response to the capture of “Pentagon Leaker” Jack Teixeira. Glenn Greenwald has already covered a lot of this on System Update, but this represents a major new progression in the […]
Matt Taibbi: On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times: […]
Michael Shellenberger: But then I learned that DiResta had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The journalist Matt Taibbi pointed me to the investigative research into the censorship industry by Mike Benz, a former State Department official in charge of cybersecurity. Benz had discovered a little-viewed video of her supervisor at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex […]
Matt Taibbi: If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language […]
Wall Street Journal: Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee. Mr. Taibbi has provoked the ire of Democrats and other journalists for […]
Jacob Sollum: Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.” According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that […]
36.”OFTEN TRUE CONTENT” The Virality Project communications mirror those produced in the recent court case Louisiana vs Biden, which showed Facebook admitting to the WHO that it, too, was censoring true content. pic.twitter.com/2qqbWZROH7 — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 17, 2023
Twitter identified “asking questions” as an attribute of a “misinformation spreader.” Our social media partner sought to censor such social deviants. #BestPractices https://t.co/aPIYzrd6Xc — Department of Fear 🇺🇸 (@FearDept) March 17, 2023 35.A Cleveland Clinic study showed previous infection offered the “same immunity” as the vaccine, but VP said discovery was susbservient to narrative: “Whether […]
Matt Taibbi: Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I just testified. The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, who […]
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key: pic.twitter.com/7lLlL2tcjN — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023 15. The report was co-authored by […]
Matt Taibbi:
Matt Taibbi: At the same time, Rouleau refused to confine “misinformation and disinformation” to protesters: Protest organizers’ mistrust of government officials was reinforced by unfair generalizations from some public officials that suggested all protesters were extremists… Where there was misinformation and disinformation about the protests, it was prone to amplification in news media… The fact that […]
John Daniel Davidson As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider […]
John Daniel Davidson As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider […]
TWITTER FILES #16 Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
TWITTER FILES #16 Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Ann Althouse summarizes: Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” NEWS: Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi talk about media’s reaction against Elon Musk for reinstalling freedom of speech on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/RulHPv5DCB — T(w)itter Takeover News (@TitterTakeover) February 14, 2023
Matt Taibbi: The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being […]
Matt Taibbi: The Hamilton 68 team also “did not individually review or verify” all the names, because their “focus” was “aggregate networks,” not “specific accounts.” So, nobody looked at the list. The list that was “the fruit of more than three years of observation and monitoring.”’ Sounds solid. Yes? No?
Matt Taibbi: Translating: individual accounts were chosen through a method developed by J.M. Berger, a writerand think-tanker whose usual specialty is extremism(he’s written about ISIS and domestic white nationalism in the U.S.). Still, it wasn’t even Berger’s fault that ordinary Americans ended up in the list, since said people were chosen “algorithmically.” The Hamilton 68 team also “did not individually […]
20.“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” wrote Carlos Monje, the future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. pic.twitter.com/JvfSkyUlfL — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
Matt Taibbi: Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank […]
Brianna Lyman: Rogan said on the podcast episode, which was released Thursday on Spotify. “And the reason why nobody trusts them anymore is because they’re not trustworthy.” Rogan then said the lack of trust in corporate media has led to the emergence of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and others. “Even if you […]
Mike Solana: It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt. A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and […]
Andrew Rotherham Over the past year and a half I wrote a few posts on Loudoun Countyand how the “narrative” about it was often at odds with the facts on the ground. From an October 2021 post: A common response to those posts was the idea this Loudoun controversy was all partisan, it was transphobic, it was […]
Jonathan Adler and Congressman Ro Khanna: Twitter banned links to the story and suspended accounts that shared it, including President Trump’s press secretary and the New York Post itself—arguing that the story violated company policy because it contained information obtained through illegal means. Under the same logic, they’d have to suspend any account that posted […]
Foundation for Freedom Online When most people think of the National Science Foundation (NSF), they think about the US government investing tax dollars in grand advancements in mathematics, aerospace and engineering. But under the Biden administration, the fastest-growing field of NSF grant funding appears to be the science of censorship. At Foundation for Freedom Online, […]
Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2022 Taibbi confirms that Twitter exec Vijaya Gadde played a key role in suppressing the Oct. 2020 Hunter Biden […]
Matt Taibbi Trump was elected in 2016. That’s a fact. The American political establishment has since refused any honest reckoning about how or why it happened. The closest the Times came to an explanation in this week’s editorial: Here's the leftist president of Mexico, @lopezobrador_, praising the un-banning of Trump. It's vital to remember: Trump's […]