Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/12/23 Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files, Russiagate and Government Censorship

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

This week on Antiwar Radio, Scott talks with Matt Taibbi about the latest batch of Twitter Files, released seconds before Taibbi jumped on the line. To start, Scott asks Taibbi to respond to the claim he’s become a right-winger. They then dig into the new Twitter Files thread which details the company and government’s response to Tweets relating to Russiagate. Taibbi frames this new drop in the context of all that’s been revealed so far and explains the overarching theme—that the government made a clear shift from monitoring online platforms to working to control what is said on them.   Discussed on the show: “Twitter Files #14 THE RUSSIAGATE LIES” (Twitter) Buying the War (IMDb) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: TK News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, January 12, 2003. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, an editor of the new book

Hotter than the Sun Time to abolish nuclear weapons You can find my full interview archive More than 5,800 of them now Going back to 2003 At Scotthorton.org And at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show

And you can't follow me on Twitter At Scott Horton Show Because I'm banned again But it wasn't the feds It was just tattletail Wannabe Stasi in the peanut gallery out there that got me banned This time I think

But anyway, introducing our guest today, it's the great Matt Taiibi, the author of many of the Twitter files. And he's the author, of course, of the great book, Hate Inc. And along with the greatness of his journalism comes all of the horrible and terrible character assassinations against him. So I'm very happy to have you back on the show. And I really appreciate you making time for me and for my audience here today. Matt, welcome. No, thanks. actually had to hustle to upload the latest Twitter files right to the second before coming on

with you today. So I'm really glad to be on. And I'm bummed about the news that you've been banned. I'm going to have to look into that. Yeah, you know, it would be nice if I could say that, like, obviously the feds got me because I'm so great on their war, Waco or something. But instead, it's just that I'm rude and then tattletails who don't like me get me in trouble for being rude. I said that Jordan Peterson should, geez, that guy should jump off a bridge for tweeting in support of the Mujahideen e-culk, communist terrorist cult, regime changers in Iran. And I didn't say it to him. I just said it about him, but that's like enough to get you in trouble with the Stasi.

But anyway, I guess. I got so much to ask you. It's so little time today, Matt. Can we start, and I know you've got a brand new scoop, and I see Devin Nunes memo out of the corner of my eye here on your Twitter feed, so I can't wait to talk about all of that. But if you don't mind, I'd like to give you a chance to talk about yourself for just a minute here, because people come at you so hard, and I know it's such a cliche, what happened to you and all this kind of thing. But the accusation is that you've become a right winger, and that's why you are against whatever the consensus on the liberal left is now. So I thought, you know, maybe, and especially the KPFK audience, they might really be interested to know. Have you moved right on gay marriage, the welfare state, the regulatory state, the warfare state, the state?

Are you a conservative now that you're old and have kids? No, absolutely not. And this is a propaganda tactic. I'm a little bit shocked that more people don't see through what this is. I was basically sort of moved out of the club of corporate journalism really over one issue, the reporting on the Trump Russia story. I was sent to spend the entire four years of the Trump presidency sort of assiduously covering his White House. I was going to be inside the briefing rooms and following everything that happened in Congress.

And if you look back, you'll see that I actually did one of those pieces. This is a sort of a giant first installment of the Trump presidency. But then I had to stop for ethical reasons because I could not report on the Russia stuff without getting into trouble both with the magazine and with audiences. Like, for instance, there was a huge moment in March of 2020 when Congressman Adam Schiff held hearings. and it was revealed there was an FBI investigation and he read all this stuff from the Steele dossier into the record and I sent out

a routine journalistic query saying did you vet any of that stuff and they essentially said we look forward to talking to Mr. Steele in the future to either endorse or refute the allegations made

so in other words he read the stuff into the congressional record before he'd even called the guy and this was a consistent pattern with this story. Like, if I report that, people are saying I'm helping Trump. If I don't report that, I'm being an unethical journalist. So I had to kind of sit things out. And the more, the more this kind of thing started to happen, the more I got squeezed out. And now they're calling me Ray Wing because I'm doing my job, basically. And by day, that's even like

official. Was it the New York Times or the Washington Post that called you? conservative journalist, Matt Taibi, right? Yeah, the Washington Post called me a conservative journalist. And the, the characterization in the New York Times was even more interesting, I thought. They said, and I'm going to find this quote, because it's so crazy. They said that my, quote, fan base had shifted because I was, quote, skeptical of claims of collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump's campaign. Now, sitting here in 2003 now, I think.

think we all know that I was right about that and I was right to be skeptical about that and yet I'm being called a conservative for for doing what any responsible journalists would have done in that situation and this is this is the you know it's it's a propaganda tactic if you if you move outside the tent this is what they hit hit you with yep and really all it is is you're being professional you're the guy that wrote the book the insane clown president about Donald Trump saying, hey, that doesn't make lies about him true. And let's stipulate here that despite what people might have heard, it was all a lie, Russia Gate.

None of it was true, not the hacking of the DNC and the WikiLeaks, not the interference in the Facebook and Twitter ads, and all of the accusations against Sessions and Flynn and Trump Jr. in the Tower meeting and the little black book of Paul Manafort. Ford, you know, his ledger, and every last bit of it was a damn lie. Exactly. And we're seeing just huge chunks of this sort of melting iceberg slough off as the months pass, you know, as we get farther away from this story. And, you know, the entire business is in denial about this.

I said this a few days ago that the only road back to redemption for the business is to have, like you know kind of truth and reconciliation like we screwed up about this sort of the way they kind of did it about wmd they didn't they didn't do a full one but they at least admitted there were there were huge mistakes in that story and they haven't done that with this and as a result the you know the business is seeing catastrophic loss of audience uh you're you're seeing lots of people flock to independent journalists like you and me and and why is that because they don't trust these other journalists. They see, they see them as propagandists for either a party or the state. And that's a correct assessment, I think. Yep, absolutely. All right. Well,

listen, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with the great Matt Taiibi. He's now at Taibi.substack.com. And that's his latest is America needs truth and reconciliation on Russiagate and check his Twitter feed. It's M. Taibi. And he's got a brand new breaking Twitter thread today. files number 14, the Russiagate lies. And this really is at the heart of the influence campaign by the federal police on Twitter, right, is Russiagate. Now, I know, actually, let me say, I think we all know that the State Department was getting in on trying to use Twitter and their color-coded revolutions as early as 2009 in Iran, I think, or earlier than that, certainly had a huge influence on all different sides during the Arab Spring. And,

So they knew that I know the State Department was very interested in using it. Maybe it's the FBI getting involved in censoring Americans. That's the huge new advent of the Russiagate era. Is that right, Matt? Yeah, I mean, I think we see repeatedly in these files that the foreign threat is used kind of casually as an excuse to build new pathways between the companies and the security agencies. I do think that somewhere there's a piece of the story that we're not seeing somewhere inside the government where there's probably some kind of organized, you know, a plan is a strong way to put it. But, you know, an idea that we have to take more opportunistic advantage of crises to work our way into the moderation processes of all these social media companies. after 9-11, it was overtly the case that the government went to all of these companies

and found basically a limitless number of ways to get information about users from these firms. The new thing is controlling what people say on these platforms. And I have to think that there's a guidance about that somewhere, too, but we haven't seen it yet. Yeah. All right. So let's start with really today's story. on the Russian bots and the release the memo hashtag, remind us about what memo ever needed to be released and what was so important about that. So this is just one example of how ridiculous this whole thing got. Devin Nunes, who is the chairman of the House Intel Committee at the beginning of the Trump years, released the classified memo in early 2018, asserted. that there had been systematic abuses of the FISA surveillance process and that, among other things, the Steele dossier had been used improperly as evidence in warrant applications.

And not only did news agencies basically uniformly come out and say that that was not only a lie, but grounds to have him removed from Congress. Like move on.org actually started a petition to have them removed for writing this memo. But then there was a second thing that happened, which is that both the press and a number of prominent politicians, including Diane Feinstein, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Adam Schiff said that there was a hashtag released a memo that had been boosted by Russian bots and Russian influence operations. And what we find or what I find in the Twitter files is this huge series of emails back and forth between Twitter employees essentially saying there's no Russians involved in the story. We examined it. We're not finding anything. Don't do it. They're trying to wave off Blumenthal.

If you do this, you're going to look silly. It's one thing like that after another. And it's just, it's just the latest episode in which we see that these companies were not seeing what we were told was happening. And how they feel all this pressure that, geez, the politicians really want us to come up with something to say that they're telling the truth about this, right? Yeah, there was a really telling email in which a Twitter executive report's coming back from, from a media. with the ranking member of the Senate Intel Committee, Mark Warner, and basically says, Warner is under a lot of pressure to keep this story in the news. And he's pressuring us to, quote, keep producing material. And, you know, I think the meaning of that, it's pretty obvious.

Warner was upset that Twitter had not produced a significantly large number of suspicious Russian accounts and wanted more of them. And it took a while, but they eventually got around to, giving him numbers that were more in line with what he wanted. And in order to do that, they had to hire an outside PR firm and an outside law firm that had a lot of connections to the Democratic Party. The whole thing is incredibly shady. But the basic story is Twitter wasn't finding it. And neither was Facebook, by the way. Yeah, I love that. How the first thing they do, they don't even need to be told, right? Oh, we better hire a PR firm that's very close to the Democrats and cost a lot of money and just make sure that,

everybody's getting along before this gets any further down the path of conflict between the two. The state's the state. At the end of the day, they're the ones with the power. Although in America, there's supposed to be a First Amendment. Is that part of this discussion at all? Yeah, I think so. I think some of the more significant revelations that we've come across have to do with the structure of the process by which various government agencies are sending these huge lists. of moderation, quote, unquote, requests to the companies.

And, you know, I think there's lots of internal evidence that adds up to these were not really requests. This was, this was mandatory. Just to take one example, they were paid, right? $3.4 million by the FBI in 2020. And the payment was for, quote, processing requests, right? In another example, there's an internal guidance by Twitter where they say publicly, we're only going to remove content at, quote, our sole discretion. Privately, we'll remove any content that's, quote, identified by the U.S. intelligence community

as a foreign threat actor conducting cyber operations. So they're basically saying we're going to remove anything the intelligence community tells us to. Interesting. Sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors.

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A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. And now, I'm trying to think going back, when the proper not list came out where everyone who was good on Russiagate was accused of pushing Russian propaganda, it was a demonstrated fact. It was the world socialist website. The Trotskyite sect did a deep investigation of this. And they showed where a lot of websites, including anti-war.com and truth out and truth dig. And we all got completely crushed in the Google search algorithm. and in the Facebook algorithms. And I wonder if you can go back and dig into that and show which all journalists they were targeting

based on the lies. Did they ever figure out if that was Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast behind that or what? No, I don't know. I mean, that was Project Owl, right, for Google. And obviously, Google has a lot more influence on things like search terms and visibility of, you know, the general types of actors like they were able to do that without probably specifically using

entering any of your names um they just they just changed the way they measured what was considered authoritative right so for instance um in the case of the world socialist website the metaphor they get they told me when i spoke to them about this was in the old days if you looked up baseball you might see your local Little League. Now you're going to see MLB.com. So if you're looking up Trotskyite politics, instead of seeing the world socialist website, which is the world's leading Trotskyite site, you're going to see like a New York Times article about Trotskyism. So that's how they got around it. They tweak the algorithm so that it heightens certain kinds of things above other things. Now, with Twitter, it was much more individualized. Like, they would do that with

individual pages, and then they would do things like throw what they call bots out into the ether, which would, in some cases, automatically drive down traffic to certain kinds of sites. But I don't, honestly, I haven't investigated that side of it as closely as I have other stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's all kinds of questions here. You're going to have a lot of work to do. I hope you don't stop. Hopefully. Yeah. Well, listen, so we got to talk about COVID and but also, well, first before that, because this really is a foreign policy show, what about the Palestinians and how much pressure does Twitter get from the Israelis demanding that they want this, that, and the other person taken down? And there's some pretty high profile ones from even in the days of Elon Musk where

this Palestinian reporter was banned. And Rula Jabriel, I think is her name, who I forget, I if she's a journalist or an activist, was seemingly suspended over some nonsense the other day, too. Right. Yeah, I mean, I've written about this in the past and probably knew more about it before I started doing the Twitter files. With the Twitter files, we're using incredibly broad search terms to try to get, you know, sort of big themes as opposed to looking at individual names. speaking and and for that reason unless we see it come up um you know for instance we're like we're looking for uh communications between the fbi and yole roth who's the you know former chief sensor of the platform unless any of that comes up in that traffic we're not going to see it right so well but can you ask like where's the traffic between yol roth and the Israeli foreign ministry

I could, but I have to triage the, like, there's a whole bunch of us, and there's a queue for searches, and we have to triage what we're asking for. So, like, yeah, you know, I'm still at the stage where I'm asking about, you know, sort of larger things. Like, what is, what did the White House ask for over a four-year period, which might be a huge number of emails that they would ask me, then ask me to, like, reduce somehow. So it's going to take a while before we get down to individual names. But to answer a question that people have a lot, you know, how come we're not seeing names in the left as much as names in the right? One of the answers to that question is it looks like the Democratic Party, the DNC, the representatives of people like Joe Biden were far more aggressive in reaching out to, companies like Twitter, then let's just say the Republicans were. Like they didn't have any hope or belief that they were going to get anything from these

companies. So they didn't write to them. So we have all of this traffic from essentially the Biden campaign or people like that requesting this or that be taken down, but we're not seeing the same thing from the other side. And that's, is that an accident of, of. of the accidental result of how we're searching? Is it because there are more offenses on the right as opposed to on the left?

Like, I don't know, but we're just not seeing that stuff as much. Well, and part of that, too, right, was when Trump was the president, the state itself was not under him. They stayed loyal to the ancient regime there, basically. So it's not so much a matter of partisanship or, like, liberal versus conservative belief systems or anything like that. But it's a matter of the FBI and the CIA ganging up on pro-Trump people, right? If he had been a rogue Democrat, it would have been going after Democrats. Right, right, exactly.

And, you know, we did find, like, for instance, there was one instance where Twitter didn't want to deal with a wing of the State Department because they felt it was too close to the Trump administration. administration. And so they tried to, they tried to avoid giving in and moderate, you know, deleting some accounts. But what we, what ends up happening is that they, they do it for everybody, whether they're on the Republican side or the Democratic side. And you're right that they, they, they had a preference for, let's say, the FBI and the DHS during Trump years, because they felt those agencies were not under Trump's control.

But ultimately, I think the institutions have much more of an independent presence that's not, like I think they're more in the driver's seat than the parties are. Like that's my perception. Well, it's also, isn't it just the case that over at Twitter, the employees were far more likely to ban a right-wing rando or someone they perceived as being a right-winger. or not on the team versus the others. I mean, it's not just Donald Trump. There's a million people who've been kicked off a Twitter for no good reason.

I mean, we started off. I was actually somehow defending them when you're taking my side for them kicking me off for cracking a joke, right? Right. But I don't want to, I don't like making it about me. But the point is that there's a million people who deserve to have their Twitter account restored still. Yeah. And obviously the company overwhelmingly had a culture that was pro-democratic. And that's kind of to be expected.

That's sort of the norm on Silicon Valley. There's no such thing as an open conservative in the email record at Twitter, right? Like those people, they don't pop up anywhere. Occasionally, you do see people pop up and object to doing this or that to a Republican politician. You know, there was some hesitancy, for instance, about blocking or labeling Mike Huckabee because he made a joke about, you know, casting votes on behalf of his dead relatives or something like that. But you're absolutely right. That kind of thing was much less likely to be allowed to slide when it was a Republican as opposed to a Democrat.

And that comes through in a lot of these instances. Well, it's also the case, too, that, you know, the people. people who know their right usually aren't so desperate to censor everybody else. And what we're talking about here, mostly is people censored for being right. People for being good on Russiagate, being good on Ukraine gate, being good on opposing all of the totalitarian COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates and all of these things. And for that matter, sticking up for the Palestinians. I think one of the threads was about Saudi influence trying to clamp down on people who were anti-Yemen war activists. Maybe that, Matt, is why I have not been allowed to gain more than

3,000 followers in the last, what, eight months, you know? Yeah, they have, they have an extraordinarily, an extraordinary array of tools they can pull out to reduce your visibility all the way down to zero and amplify it all the way up to everybody in the world sees you. And on the follower side, that's still a little hazier to me because I think, that takes place in an area of the company that I don't really understand all that well yet it's in what they call the operation side I think but clearly they can do that I went through the same thing I mean for years I was stuck on the same number which made no sense no it doesn't come right you know if you have a tweet that that gets 30,000 retweets and you don't gain any

followers out of that like that there's something odd about that yeah all right so anti-war radio talking with the great Matt Taibi. He's got a brand new thread out today, M. Taibi on Twitter about one of the aspects of Russiagate. But can you talk a little bit about COVID and the excuse of invoking public health here to censor some of the brightest doctors, some of the most of the most credible people in the field of medicine on the planet? Yeah, one of the first things that we saw that was, that gave us a clue that there was something pretty intense that we had to be looking at was we were we were allowed to look at what they called like the pv2 page i think it's called of um the stanford dr j bad a charia and i guess he

was critical in in some respects of covid policy but in but in some very mild way like rational way and there's a big big old label on page it says trends blacklist which just means this person is not allowed to trend right so you know Alex Barrenson did a brief thread earlier this week on some of that David Zweig did another one and look I think the consistent picture you get with not just with Twitter and not just with Facebook and not even just in America is that governments like to use the excuse of public emergencies to wedge their way into the internal processes of companies like this. Just before the Trump thing happened with Twitter, the EU went to the same companies

in the wake of ISIS bombings in Brussels and Paris and basically presented them with a choice. You can either be legislated to the point where you're not going to be profitable in Europe or you can let us, you know, be more aggressive in the content moderation front. And that's kind of what happened in America, too. Yep. You know, I'm sure you remember the old Bill Moyers documentary, buying the war about Iraq War II. Right.

And Dan Rather is in there, and he says, listen, when you work at one of these giant companies, you don't need a memo to remind you that this is a billion-dollar corporation with regulatory needs in Washington, D.C. And so you can only go so far. period. Absolutely. And, and, you know, we saw that pretty overtly with Twitter, right? Like, we found these emails that that were just embarrassing, you know, they, they're circulating um, an article from the Washington Post that's criticizing them for not, uh, delivering more on

the, on the Russian threat front. And the, the email says, hey, fellas, um, um, here's a news story that's going to affect our political advertising. And they say that right in the open, right? And then there's another email later that says, understanding that we're making changes to our policies in anticipation of future legislation, here are some changes that we're making. So they know exactly what they're doing.

They're altering their stance on things based on what they think is going to keep keep them profitable. Yep. With the government, essentially holding a gun to their head. Absolutely. Deciding the margin there, not the customers. All right. Well, with that, we're all out of time. I'm sad to say, but I really do appreciate you making time to come on the show and talk with us about this. It's some of the most important journalism of at least the last year and maybe a lot longer than that.

And I know I speak for a lot of people when I say how grateful I am for the work you're doing on this, Matt. No, Scott. Thank you very. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. All right, you guys, that is Matt Taibi. The book is Hate, Inc. on Substack. He writes at TK News. That's Taibi.substack.com. And check out all this great Twitter threads on the Twitter files at M. Taibi.

And that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Find my full radio archive at Scott Horton.org. And maybe I'll be unbanned again at some point soon. You could follow me then on Twitter at Scott Horton. important show, and I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.