The Twitter Files Elon Musk And Matt Taibbi Don't Want You To Know About
The Twitter Files Elon Musk And Matt Taibbi Don't Want You To Know About
This was a real attempt to suppress free speech, and it wasn't by the Democrats or the FBI.
by Ben Cohen
We’ve spent a lot of time covering the #TwitterFiles story at The Banter, not because the files reveal anything particularly interesting, but to reveal the true motivations of those responsible for publishing them.
It has been a tricky story to report on given all of the moving parts, but a clear picture emerges when examining crucial context and the incentives of the publishers. As we’ve shown, instead of revealing a Democratic/Big Tech/Deep State conspiracy, the TwitterFiles story has really exposed a new, powerful media coalition dedicated to spreading misinformation and further fracturing America’s fragile media system.
In a new, bizarre twist to the story though, it appears the characters involved in the story were more irresponsible, more misleading, and perhaps more sinister than we previously thought.
The big nothing
Major media outlets barely covered the internal communications Elon Musk decided to leak through hand picked journalists for very good reason. As TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey noted, rather than exposing nefarious connections between tech companies, law enforcement agencies and the Democratic Party, “The banal truth is that, if other newsrooms are anything like our own, they read each as a matter of diligence, and simply found nothing new or interesting to report, or what little there was contaminated by the dubious circumstances of their presentation.”
Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the files he was given by Musk has been particularly concerning. Taibbi egregiously mislead his readers by claiming the files definitely proved the Russia collusion story was a “hoax”. He also unfairly smeared a company set up to track Russian disinformation on Twitter and failed to provide crucial context that definitively disproved his narrative. Taibbi made it seem like Twitter was the only platform Kremlin backed propagandists were targeting (Twitter was relatively unimportant in the 2016 election) and didn’t bother mentioning Twitter executives growing concern about Russia’s increasingly sophisticated campaigns on their platform. He characterized the FBI’s monitoring of prominent social media accounts potentially promoting Russian disinformation as improper “meddling in domestic speech”, this despite the FBI never demanding a post be taken down or an account suspended.
Other TwitterFiles journalists Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, David Zweig and Alex Berenson revealed similarly innocuous, highly selective information leaked by Musk, but the attention fueled claims of a giant “Deep State” coverup. Joe Rogan declared the story “bigger than Watergate”, and Taibbi even demanded the media issue a mea culpa for the damage it did during the Russia collusion story. Taibbi called out Mother Jones for its reporting on the dashboard tracking Russian disinformation, prompting a response from Elon Musk and Mother Jones, who promised to look into the matter:
More than two weeks later, Mother Jones has not responded to Taibbi or Musk. None of the articles Taibbi cited have been updated, and no retractions have been issued. One can confidently surmise that this isn’t because Mother Jones is afraid of admitting journalistic errors.
The story has no legs, and Taibbi has such little credibility left that the publication didn’t see fit to give it more exposure.
A real abuse of power
In a new development to the story, it transpires there was an actual attempt by the government to improperly meddle in free speech — a far more egregious one that went right to the top of our governmental institutions. Bizarrely, Elon Musk and none of the TwitterFiles journalists bothered mentioning it. Why?
Because the meddling was done by the Trump White House.
In a shocking story revealed during testimony at The House Oversight and Accountability Committee last week, we learned that on September 9th 2019, White House officials called up Twitter demanding they take down a Tweet from model Chrissy Teigen who had called president Trump “a pussy ass bitch”. And far from being an isolated incident, it seems the Trump administration was in constant contact with Twitter asking them to take down Tweets they didn’t like. Reported Rolling Stone:
Former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the White House’s Teigen tweet demand was hardly an isolated incident: The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.
“It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”
In interviews with former Twitter personnel, onetime Trump administration officials, and other people familiar with the matter, each source recalled what could be described as a “hotline,” “tipline,” or large Twitter “database” of moderation and removal requests that was frequently pinged by the offices of powerful Democrats and Republicans alike.
After the story broke, Taibbi tried to downplay his obvious dishonesty:
Taibbi did mention there had been requests from the Trump White House, but he didn’t mention what they were, or how many requests they issued. There were no lengthy threads highlighting Republican attempts to ‘meddle’ with free speech, or pieces published on his newsletter excoriating the executive branch for improper relationships with Big Tech.
The Biden campaign, filled with then private citizens, did request Twitter take down nude pictures of Hunter Biden. But this does not in any way compare to the Executive Office of The President — no doubt under direct orders from Trump — asking a social media platform to censor speech it didn’t like. It also isn’t comparable to intelligence agencies monitoring suspicious activity online designed to undermine US elections.
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What can we conclude from this? Taibbi and the other TwitterFiles journalists either weren’t aware of the Republican efforts to censor free speech, or they knew and didn’t bother reporting on it. If it’s the former, then they are guilty of terrible journalism and shilling for a politically motivated billionaire. If it’s the latter, then they actively misled the public and should apologize to their readers for a grotesque abdication of their journalistic duty. Either way, their reporting should be updated with this new information with an explanation on why this changes the entire premise of the story.
Elon Musk’s political motivations are now extremely clear: he aimed to smear Democrats and shame so-called liberal media outlets by publishing highly selective files from Twitter HQ. At the very least, the journalists he picked did not question his motives and irresponsibly published the files without relevant context.
More likely though is that Taibbi and co. knew exactly what they were doing and that they would pay no professional price for their journalistic transgressions. In fact, they stood to profit from their terrible reporting immensely. The Twitter Files scoop allowed Taibbi and Weiss etc. to rapidly grow their ‘Alternative media industrial complex’, and further fracture the media landscape they profess to despise so much. They no doubt calculated the media would ignore the story, thus further fueling their conspiratorial narrative. Heads they win, tails the “Mainstream Media” loses.
Once upon a time, journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss worked to expose the insidious scheming of greedy billionaires. But with lucrative careers selling contrarian conspiracy theories to hardcore libertarians, now they just do their bidding.
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