Here’s an opportunity to find out from Matt Taibbi himself about the research he’s been doing in Twitter files for the last few months. What was it about his activity that so worried government officials that they sent the FBI to his home on the day he was scheduled to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government? The FBI claimed they came to ask him about an alleged identity issue with his 2021 IRS filing (even though his filing was accepeted in full without question for that and subsequent years). What was it about his research that so angered Democratic representative Stacey Plaskett that she sent Taibbi a letter threatening him with a prison term for “lying to Congress” (as a result of an acronym error, wherein he  mistakenly referred to CIS, the  Center for Internet Security, as “CISA”)?

What seems to have frightened Plaskett and other government officials is the conclusion Taibbi drew from his research, clearly stated in the summary of his formal remarks to the committe, a conclusion having grave First Amendment implications:

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”

Plain and simple, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

In his talk below, Taibbi expresses the sort of journalistic sensibility we usually associate with the highest ethical standards of his profession.  It is not Taibbi who has gone over to the Dark Side. Rather, he is exposing those who have done so.

To understand this, you’ll have to do a little work, make a little effort, beginning with spending the time to hear him out. The following is an excerpt from a recent address he gave (he called it the “Censorship Industrial Complex”). You can get the gist of his argument in the first twenty minutes of this excerpt (which I have indexed to begin at 11 minutes and 26 seconds after the start of his whole talk).

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(1) By the way, if you are curious to know who misinformed us about Matt Taibbi, here’s a good place to start:

“Lee Fang: MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Gets Basic Facts Wrong on DHS Content Moderation Partnership”
(Plaskett’s threatening letter was inspired by Mehdi Hasan’s erroroneous reporting)

(2) See also Lee Fang (pronounced “fong”) video:

GLOSSARY
“Content Moderation”  (Censorship)