The Twitter Files Part I
The mainstream media reaches a new low.
Yesterday, Elon Musk collaborated with independent journalist Matt Taibbi to release “The Twitter Files,” the inside tale of how Twitter employees censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. It is arguably the clearest example yet of how what was supposed to be a historically democratizing technological tool was transformed into a dystopian force for censorship and control by a bunch of purebred petulant progressives on a rogue power trip.
Basically, these Twitter executives made up a BS excuse — that the story was based on “hacked materials” — to take unprecedented censorship action against a major media outlet in the form of the paradigm-shifting suppression of a relevant news story just weeks before a presidential election.
There was never any evidence that the documents originating from the Hunter Biden laptop were hacked, and we now know Twitter executives knew this while still citing the “hacking” policy1 to justify censorship. This is all the more outrageous considering Twitter and other outlets didn’t censor Trump tax return stories — which were based on illegally obtained information — and that’s because this supposed rule about hacking only applies when information damages Democrats. Taibbi specifically highlights the frequency with which Democratic leaders used backdoor favoritism to have voices censored for wrongthink.
This starts to make more sense when you dig into who exactly was running the show at the time. Here’s Yoel Roth, one of the key figures behind the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story who fabricated the hacking justification, saying that the decision to ban Trump after January 6 was based on the “trauma” he and other “content moderators” experienced online that fateful day:
The only thing Roth loves more than censoring conservative voices is Hillary Clinton:
The Twitter Files revelations are part of a broader pattern that has been playing out for years now: Small, unelected groups of private executives making sweeping decisions about speech, cheered on by Democratic Party politicians, as part of an increasingly organized, top-down system of corporatized speech restraints.
And here’s a shocker: Not a single mainstream media outlet has covered the Twitter Files story. The least curious people in the country right now are the credentialed news media. How disgustingly ironic that newspapers with highfalutin mottos like “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and ”All the News That’s Fit to Print” are refusing to cover arguably the biggest story of the year in even the briefest of ways. It’s testament to the bizarre situation we now find ourselves, in which the biggest advocates of state and corporate censorship are media corporations and their employees. Journalists are among the leading proponents for political censorship. That is surreal.
Professional journalists are supposed to have one bias—against power. They’re supposed to fight for transparency and look out for the common folks, the little guys, which means the disclosure of this scandal and the depth of Twitter’s rot before Elon Musk cleaned house should be the talk of the town. But today’s journalists are one dimensional hacks who carry water for the Democratic Party first and foremost, which means anything that reflects poorly on them is systematically ignored.
Their newest excuse for downplaying all this is based on the idea that the real reason the story was censored is because the laptop had pictures of Hunter Biden’s genitals on it. As if people were ever interested in that as opposed to the treasure trove of damning information about the Biden family, and as if the bigger issue isn’t the recently discovered communications showing Twitter executives deciding to peremptorily impose unprecedented censorship action on one of America’s oldest newspapers despite admitting they lacked any factual basis for doing so.
Every single liberal journo out there steadfastly downplaying/ignoring the Twitter Files story knows that if this were a story that combined salacious and inept content from one of Donald Trump’s sons, with the selling by that son of family influence and official access to Chinese and Ukrainian sources, they’d be talking about it nonstop for months.
It’s sad that the bulk of today’s journalists don’t see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but as members of an elite caste who circulate amongst the highest circles in Washington and greater society, hobnobbing with the very people they’re tasked with covering. They’re monoculture-worshipping liberal shills, and this has never been more clear based on how they’re treating Matt Taibbi, who broke the story. Look at these morons:
No surprise that Ben Collins, the delicate little fairy who’s fresh off his tearfully contrived TV monologue in which he appointed himself to speak on behalf of deceased mass shooting victims and actually made stuff up about them so that he could push a false narrative, has derisively referred to Matt Taibbi as “Substack Man.” Folks, Matt Taibbi is a class act and a fitting example of what a real journalist is. He also makes an absolute killing on Substack. I aspire to be a “Substack Man.”
You can quibble with how Taibbi interprets evidence and draws conclusions, but that’s not what this is about. These tools are sharing in a collective tantrum because they see him as a traitor to his class, and because he’s committing an unpardonable offense in their world, which is to report things that reflect poorly on the journalism profession.
Taibbi posted primary source material that anyone can evaluate for themselves. Yet, not a single one of these media clowns chiding him for doing Musk’s PR2 will think twice about the next New York Times piece spreading bullshit from unnamed “officials” and “people familiar with the matter.”
Lastly, it’s important to understand something: The issue was never that Hunter Biden’s laptop was necessarily going to swing the election (though it very well could have, mind you), but rather how utterly brazen the lies were and the fact that Democrats and their media myrmidons got away with it because they used the same tired all-purpose propaganda line — “Russian interference/disinformation” — that they’ve used since 2016. How ironic: Claiming that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was actual disinformation.
In closing, Russian-British satirist Konstantin Kisin aptly sums up how I feel about this affair, and his first tweet particularly resonates with me:
On top of the fact that in order for Twitter to consider materials “hacked,” it requires an “official/law enforcement finding of a hack.”
Musk doesn’t believe in PR. That’s why the Twitter communications team was the first to get the “peace out, Cub Scouts” notice. Have you ever seen a Tesla commercial? That’s because the company has spent zero dollars on marketing (absolutely incredible, when you think about it), and that’s true for all of Musk’s companies. Musk having Taibbi break the Twitter Files story on Twitter itself was a brilliant move because it resulted in a massive rise in engagement on the platform. Indeed, Taibbi essentially doubled his Twitter following from approximately 600k to 1.2 million in less than 24 hours.
"Matt Taibbi is a class act and a fitting example of what a real journalist is."
I couldn't agree more.
My progressive friends mostly said nothing, one said "yawn, taibbi is a hack". Thing that's weird about that too me is that taibbi has a long and illustrious history of being a bull dog for the left and speaking truth to power. The left is just gone