Matt Taibbi's Insane 17,000 Word Attack On The "Censorship-Industrial Complex"

It didn't take long to figure out most of the examples in The Racket report were completely bogus.

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger

by Ben Cohen

When I saw the chart Matt Taibbi posted to Twitter with a link to his latest piece on “liberal censorship”, I couldn’t help but think of a certain former Fox News host who spent most of his show drawing insane George Soros diagrams on chalkboards. So I posted this as a response:

I was spammed relentlessly by Taibbi’s followers (the tweet was seen by over 100,000 people) and ended up having to mute the thread. Either way, it apparently hit a sore spot:

The tweet was a joke, but I figured I’d read his article titled “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know” to see whether Taibbi and his team at The Racket really did have evidence of this huge Deep State conspiracy.

It didn’t take long to figure out that there was no serious evidence, and, perhaps more importantly, what this was really all about.

Meet the new “military industrial complex”

Taibbi wrote the introduction to the report, setting the scene with an ominous reminder of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s notorious warning on the perils of the “military industrial complex” in 1961:

On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history….

This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within. 

Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.

He then followed with this incredible leap of logic:

The Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions. 

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

This “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is, according to Taibbi, “a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.”

And there we have it: the Trump-Russia scandal was fake yet everyone believed it, so a new highly dangerous industry of seemingly benevolent fact checkers sprouted up to help The Deep State to censor Americans.

You then have to then get through a 17,000 word article smearing 50 companies/non-profits he claims are part of this huge “Censorship-Industrial Complex” to understand this point — a point that unfortunately doesn’t have much substance behind it.

A hit job

The article is clearly designed for the Matt Taibbi/Glenn Greenwald specialist, so it took a monumental effort to get through it. But you only have to read the first “exposé” to see how utterly silly the whole thing is.

Taibbi’s team picked the ‘Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University’ as their first target. Here’s how they characterized the university institute:

Characteristic/worldview quotes: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior, information pollution, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, and malinformation, and information disorder.

Gibberish verbiage: “The most accessible inoculation technique is prebunking — the process of debunking lies, tactics or sources before they strike.”

In the #TwitterFiles: First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of “trusted people to come together to talk about what they’re seeing,” were part of the Aspen Institute’s Burisma tabletop, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials….

Closely connected to: Almost all the leading lights of the CIC, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Trusted News Initiative, Shorenstein Center, DFRLabs, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, Meedan, and Bellingcat.

Contrary to the flippant description, The Information Futures Lab is actually a very well respected institution that has done excellent work on things like combatting vaccine disinformation — disinformation that the CDC has warned is one of the biggest threats to public health in existence. But not according to The Racket team, who conclude:

In sum: With a strong ability to both know and direct emerging trends, and with a large array of elite networks in tow, the IFL will continue to serve as one of the key tastemakers in the “anti-disinformation” field.

In his Twitter Files work Taibbi didn’t actually uncover any attempts by government agencies to censor free speech, he just insinuated they were there — a fact most real journalists quickly picked up on. And that’s exactly what is going on here — there isn’t any evidence Information Futures Lab is engaging in coordinated speech censorship, just heavy sarcasm and insinuation.

It gets worse

Given we don’t have huge resources at The Banter to dig into everything Taibbi and his team claimed in their 17,000 word magnum opus, I picked randomly from their list of 50 non-profits to see whether any of their claims stood up. Scrolling down the page I came to their characterization of The Aspen Institute:

You may have read about them when: The Aspen Institute holds its annual “Ideas Festival” and summits featuring state leaders and elected officials of both parties, notable bureaucrats, journalists and professors, executives and “thought leaders.” Highlights from Aspen include:

• Blocking the release of then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of stop-and-frisk tactics and the seizure of “guns from male minorities between ages 15 and 25.”

• Columbia law professor Timothy Wu, before his appointment to President Biden’s National Economic Council, argued at the Aspen Ideas Festival that “traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era.” 

• In 2020, the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to “Break the Pentagon Papers principle” and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of “disinformation.”

• A 2021 “Disinfo Discussion” featured Steve Hayes, the author of “The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.”

I followed the hyperlink on bullet point three (highlighted in bold above) to a Fox News article from Twitter Files journalist and notorious climate change denier Michael Shellenberger. The article began with a strangely familiar theme — and terminology:

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex." Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the "complex," or cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense would "endanger our liberties or democratic processes."….

Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy.

Paraphrasing/plagiarism issues aside, The Racket article claims specifically that The Aspen institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center “urged journalists to “Break the Pentagon Papers principle”.

Is the claim correct? Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be highly misleading. Shellenberger’s article briefly mentions this point and provides no sources. He writes:

And yet, in 2020, the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to "Break the Pentagon Papers principle" and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of "disinformation."

Shellenberger was referring to a co-paper authored by veteran journalist Janine Zacharia and former Obama and Trump Cybersecurity Policy Director Andrew James Grotto. The paper was titled “How to Responsibly Report on Hacks and Disinformation” and outlined guidelines for journalists to navigate highly sensitive information in a new digital world. Zacharia and Grotto were also invited to an Aspen Institute zoom call to discuss the paper. Taibbi reported on this earlier in May, providing the following screenshot of the paper (highlights by Taibbi):

Taibbi (and presumably Shellenberger) believes this to be a smoking gun, because as Taibbi writes:

This summary was sent by Aspen Digital’s Executive Director and former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller to two other Aspen figures on September 15, 2020. Echoing the Stanford paper, it summarized the lessons Aspen Digital learned from examining the hack-and-dump problem, explaining the need to put “provenance front and center”

Apparently The Aspen Institute is part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” because their Digital’s Executive Director (former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller) sent an email to “two other Aspen figures” asking questions that may have been based on Zacharia and Grotto’s paper. Here was the offending email (via The Racket):

No evidence of The Aspen Institute urging journalists to “break the Pentagon Papers principle” and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of “disinformation””. Just an email from a long time veteran of the news business on designing sensible, ethical guidelines for how journalists should report on leaked/hacked information. Notably, Janine Zacharia and Andrew James Grotto are not part of The Aspen Institute, and neither is Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.

But put together a fancy graphic with lots of links, omit crucial context and hope readers don’t dig into any of your claims and then it all makes sense.

Taibbi’s reporting can’t be trusted

The real motivation behind The Racket’s extraordinary piece can be found in Taibbi’s reporting over the past few years. Taibbi has staked his journalistic reputation on these four theories:

1. The Trump-Russia story is a giant hoax.

2. Russia is not a threat to the US, or Ukraine.

3. The Twitter Files reveal sophisticated attempts by the US government to curtail free speech in America.

4. Joe Biden and the Democrats are the greatest threat to civil liberties and democracy, not Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The problem with these theories that have gained extraordinary traction in Alt Left and Alt Right circles is that none of them are true — and Taibbi has wrecked his reputation defending them. You only had to watch Taibbi’s demolition at the hands of Mehdi Hasan to see how poorly sourced his stories are. The MSNBC presenter tore apart the entire basis of his Twitter Files reporting, exposing the fact that Taibbi made so many errors nothing he said could be taken seriously.

On some level, Taibbi most likely understands this, so like all good ideologues, he is doubling down on his fact free reporting with even more fact free reporting.

There may be some elements of truth to the giant “Censorship-Industrial Complex”, but it is impossible to tell from a story with so many basic errors. You cannot claim there is a “relentless, unified messaging system” aimed at propagandizing Americans into believing that free speech at home helps enemies abroad if your evidence consists of an Aspen Institute executive emailing two people about a paper she may have read.

Furthermore, Taibbi’s entire argument rests on the idea that combatting disinformation is bad, and that private social media platforms are obligated to pump out disinformation from malevolent actors. Then the 50 non-profits he cites working to stop disinformation are the bad guys, and not the other way round.

It is peculiar to witness a journalist advocating so powerfully for the freedom to spread disinformation while simultaneously dedicating significant effort to criticizing those who combat it. Given Taibbi is now a prominent purveyor of disinformation himself, it isn’t hard to understand why.

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