Described as a "trailblazer in journalism" during his introduction, Matt Taibbi addressed a crowd of interns while giving a lecture on the Twitter Files scandal in Washington, D.C., today. Taibbi was one of the handful of journalists who was given access to internal communications of Twitter.
Twitter is often the chosen platform for informational and political controversies, but Taibbi focused on a bigger concern: Many mainstream journalists do not want to shed light on the important issue of censorship of speech. Americans do not know enough about how the government hides information from them, but it is now time that we address it.
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Taibbi identified the underlying issues that contribute to the government’s involvement in the censorship of free speech. For example, Taibbi mentioned how concerning it was to find that not only major digital media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google but also government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were all key players in this infringement process.
It is indeed bizarre to have 20-25 of the biggest tech companies regularly meet with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to discuss content moderation policies around political rhetoric. Yet the involvement of government officials in the digital and speech censorship movements has unfortunately become a reality in this country.
Legacy media journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico, among others, take this as an opportunity to create a secret alliance with government agencies to censor the voices of right-wing and independent media outlets. Not only that, but Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and former President Donald Trump were targets of this phenomenon. When this scandal came to be known to the public, the legacy media chose to make journalists like Taibbi the center of the story rather than their own involvement in digital censorship.
The government abusing its authority to partner with Big Tech companies and Democratic lawmakers was not the only form of corruption taking place, though. Democratic lawmakers asking for their critics to be removed from these platforms is also a reality that has not been addressed enough. The use of shadow-banning and other methods to censor speech has also been forgotten. The Twitter Files scandal certainly showed us a lot about federal and state governments' close transactional relationships with media companies to further propaganda and censor true stories, such as people dying from the COVID-19 vaccine.
As Taibbi puts it, "Truth is no longer a defense under this system." But when and how will the public see accountability if Big Tech corporations have stopped seeing themselves as separate from the government?
There has been no punishment to this day, and there will be none if people continue to elect corrupt Democrats to powerful positions who misuse their authority to infiltrate government agencies and push their propaganda. This is while they are casually carrying out mass constitutional violations against millions of innocent people who are just fighting for the truth to be out there. The weaponization of government agencies like the FBI and the politicization of the Department of Justice are just some examples.
Among other things, Taibbi took the time to mention how he commends the work of outlets like the Washington Examiner when it came to exposing the British company, the Global Disinformation Index, for blacklisting them and other right-wing media outlets. But it is sad to see that not enough has been done to punish the culprits involved in this game. The involvement of Democrats and Big Tech companies to suppress stories about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Russian bots on social media platforms makes justice much more difficult by killing any efforts of accountability before they can be addressed.
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One such example is the Aspen Institute informing media companies on how to soften and not cover stories that expose Democratic corruption. Another is the involvement of intelligence agencies in using a comprehensive system, including emails and Excel sheets, to regularly communicate to Big Tech companies about rhetoric. Some of these included information about government agency briefings on the Russia-Ukraine war and updates on the Inflation Reduction Act.
In the end, a lot more is left to be uncovered, but as Taibbi made clear, it is going to be a lot worse than what we have already seen.
Max Mallhi is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.