The Twitter Files and Matt Taibbi Go Viral and Divide the Internet

Revealing documents behind the Hunter Biden Laptop Saga — PR for the world’s richest man or exposing election manipulation?

First and foremost, I love Matt Taibbi. I had a Rolling Stone subscription when I was in high school and vividly remember devouring his articles on the financial crisis and wondering how to pronounce his last name. He’s an excellent journalist, I think he’s an honest actor, and although I’m no longer a paid subscriber to his Substack, I still occasionally check out his work.

He’s catching a TON of heat these days for reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and social media suppression of the story. Some think he’s doing the bidding of and image-washing Elon Musk while others claim he’s offering an inside and important look at one of the biggest election meddling scandals in US history.

And others focus solely on Taibbi himself.

To say his lack of standing by Team Blue ruffles feathers — particularly his work on the QAnon-level bullsh*t that was Russiagate — is the understatement of the decade. People hate him for it. Liberal voters fell so deep into that wormhole that they denied an election for four years and then were shocked and appalled that Team MAGA Hat questioned the legitimacy of the following results.

The Tweets still spell it out: “We can not trust our election results” turned into “how dare you question our election results.”

Yes, there are obvious differences, but at the core, the parallel is there, and it’s not a comparison MSNBC viewers appreciate. But Maddow peddled as much provable misinformation as anyone.

Taibbi was one of the journalists, who were theoretically on the left, that routinely called out the myths Dems were pushing around 2016. He made a lot of enemies. Team ‘It’s Her Turn’ now shout spits quinoa on their laptops at the mere mention of his name.

A few years ago, Taibbi left Rolling Stone and went on to become one of Substack’s most successful writers. He’s popular for a reason; he does solid work. The dude knows the news business, and I really like his media analysis.

I have a ton of respect for the man, and again, think he’s an honest actor.

He recently went mega-viral and trended on Twitter for a thread that got a lot of people upset and even an article from the NY Times.

The internet seems divided on whether he’s selling out to Elon Musk while helping the right wing or exposing the internal censorship of social media that used its size to put its finger on the scale of a democratic election.

One thing I know for sure is that the mainstream reaction has been misguided and the attempts at character assassination have been infantile.

At its core, this is a story about powerful forces influencing democratic elections. Taibbi and the Twitter Files are revealing the internal workings of how that happened. They’re showing what people knew and when.

The episode started on December 2nd when Taibbi wrote a post to his Substack subscribers that was a bit cryptic.

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention…There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions…On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.

At the bottom of the newsletter was the first of many many tweets — it was dated the 2nd but he must have retweeted the first one:

The piece about “certain conditions” is getting a lot of focus, and I guess time will tell what those conditions might have been. It appears somebody internally at Twitter reached out to Taibbi, giving him some exclusive documents in exchange for reporting the story only on Twitter and not to his Substack audience. Who knows what other strings may have been attached?

And so, he dropped a long thread entitled, The Twitter Files and has been trending ever since.

I won’t go over the whole thing, but in a nutshell, he goes a bit into Twitter’s history as a revolutionary platform, and how it gave people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barrier.” But soon guardrails needed to be put in place to fight spam and scammers. Slowly but surely, those tools were utilized in different ways on behalf of various actors.

Eventually, both political parties could simply lobby Twitter to remove or review accounts. Because he received internal Twitter documentation, many tweets contain picture proof.

Due to the political leanings of Twitter staff, the content moderation started to skew, culminating in the 2020 election.

That NY Post story dropped less than a month before voting and was almost immediately suppressed. Links were removed and it was blocked from being sent via direct message. Taibbi shows how there was confusion within Twitter about why the story was being censored.

It was labeled as “hacked material,” but the company knew after a few hours that that wasn’t the case. Lawyers and policy heads were emailing each other trying to clarify the messaging and work out the next steps.

Lawmakers reached out expressing concern about free speech, including Democrat Ro Kanna, who was apparently the only Dem Taibbi could find.

The story was labeled “Russian Disinformation,” a phrase that is all too effective at getting many Americans to believe whatever event was directed by Putin himself from deep in the Kremlin as his snickering face glows in the light of a monitor.

The real question is, how much were the intelligence agencies involved? Taibbi doesn’t go too much into that but Zuckerberg recently admitted on the Joe Rogan podcast that Facebook was in touch with the FBI regarding the story.

Fifty former intelligence agents did sign a letter careful to not call it Russian disinformation but to say the story had all of the ‘earmarks’ of Kremlin disinfo, again, a label that is so effective it’s embarrassing.

Obviously, mainstream media dutifully went along.

Fast forward many months, and it was shown that the laptop and its contents were real. But it had already become a hot-button partisan issue. Most nominally on the left plug their ears and shout, “la la la not Russian disinfo but I don’t care” anytime there’s a mention of Hunter Biden, the laptop, or the suppression of the story.

And again, since the posting of the Twitter Files, there’s been a ton of obfuscation.

Media characters who’ve been wrong about the majority of political issues over the last four, five, or ten years are doing their best to pretend this is a story about Taibbi selling out, right-wing hysteria, Hunter Biden d*ck pics, or absolutely nothing.

Few seem to focus on what the Twitter Files are actually about.

The important piece is how brazenly intelligence agencies and social media companies lied in an attempt to favor one candidate over another.

At its core, this is a story about powerful forces influencing democratic elections. Taibbi and the Twitter Files are revealing the internal workings of how that happened. They’re showing what people knew and when.

Do we know the suppression of the story changed the election results? Of course, we don’t. Maybe it wouldn’t have had much of an effect at all. The important piece is how brazenly intelligence agencies and social media companies lied in an attempt to favor one candidate over another.

But because it is related to Donald Trump, kind-hearted liberals don’t care. When it comes to the Hunter Biden Laptop Saga, rule-of-law-democracy-loving-human-rights-fighting liberals are fine with a bit of election interference.

In this case, it arguably worked out. Donald Trump was a horrific president and is clearly a maniac. But we should be able to hate the Don — as I do — and see that this is a frightening precedent.

Everyone should be asking themselves: what happens when it is a different candidate?

Imagine there’s a new popular — probably independent — politician that is against war, as most Americans are, and thinks corporations need to be reeled in and pay their fair share, as most Americans do.

What will happen then?

The war-hungry Pentagon and never-satiated corporations would surely work together to effect the election, suppressing stories and spreading other types of misinformation. Of course, they would. The precedent has been set and these things only ratchet in one direction.

That is where the conversation should be taking place.

Is it PR for Musk? Maybe-ish, but much much much more importantly, the Twitter Files show how power can corrupt the voting process.

We should all be concerned.

Instead, mainstream contributors are copy-and-pasting the same boring attacks on Matt Taibbi, showing how shallow and feckless they are while revealing why, as an independent thinker, he’s massively popular.