Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/5/23 Matt Taibbi on the Danger of Digital Censorship

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Scott was joined by Matt Taibbi this week on Antiwar Radio. They discuss some of Taibbi’s recent reporting on the government-NGO-corporate media joint effort to flag and suppress certain news and opinions that they deem to be disinformation. They take a step back and look at the broader context behind this story and discuss some evidence that the fight against this new digital censorship regime can work.  Discussed on the show: “People Can Win” (Racket News) Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket 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, April 6th, 20203, 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 the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the editor of the book, Hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You find my full interview archive,

almost 6,000 of them now, going back to almost 20 years ago, April 12, 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right to you guys, on the line, I've got the great Matt Taiibi from Rackett News, it's called now.

That's racket.com news. Welcome back to the show. Matt, how you doing, sir? I'm good, Scott. How are you doing? Very good. Happy to have you on the show here. And man, you keep breaking stories. You've got such great work going on with these Twitter files here. And I know the story has really evolved lately. But I'm going to start off with the good news. You've got this great piece called People Can Win about how, you know, it seems like the war party, they got all the money. They're organized. They have their way. And who are we the disorganized masses to try to object? And yet you show here that actually is possible when we get our act together, huh? Yeah, I think it also shows, you know, the subject of this piece is that the Department of Homeland Security, after trying to introduce a what they called a disinformation governance board last year, if you remember that was run by that crazy Nina Jankowitz woman who had the Mary Poppins song that she sang on Twitter, they had to shut that down within three weeks due to a public outcry. Then they quietly moved this kind of Orwellian. thing to a subcommittee called the MDM subcommittee and sort of tried to keep it going but out of public view. And it looks like they've shut that down. I think in response to just sort

of general public outcry about censorship, maybe the Twitter file stuff and some other things. And I think it just shows that they do respond to where they think the public's attitudes are. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I guess what people got to always keep in mind, right, is that whatever is going on here with the Twitter files. Somewhere there exists, the Google files and the Facebook files and the Apple files and all the rest of it. I mean, it's not like they were just picking on Twitter. The difference with Twitter is it was bought by this wild man, independent billionaire. Well, I don't know. He's a Pentagon contractor, but he's independent enough that he decided to give the keys to you, which is something that hasn't happened. Yeah, you and some other.

So, yeah, I think this is, again, it's straight out of Orwell. They don't want the public to be remembering things. I think tools like the wayback machine are going to, you know, come under siege a little bit. As you say, the searching has become more complicated, even on sites like Duck, Duck Go. I mean, I moved from Google to another search engine a couple of months ago, and it's just bad all around now. I think they just don't want people using the tools that the original kind of free internet idea promised because they want people rooted in the present and sort of glued to whatever official propaganda they're cranking out. And that's that's very scary. So talk to us a little bit about this MDM subcommittee, which you say has now been deleted.

Of course, they're going to try to figure out new ways. to keep coming back but this is some pretty you know talk about orwell this i wouldn't have thought of some of this stuff yeah so they had this thing called the mdm subcommittee and that's for misinformation disinformation and malinformation and the uh the important ingredient here is that last m malinformation malinformation malinformation is just a euphemism for true but inconvenient it's it's a fact that may be factually correct, but which produces a result they don't like. So, for instance, in the context of COVID, we saw in the Twitter files that Stanford's Verality Project, which is sort of a clearinghouse for COVID reviews of content, they were

very upset about things like true stories of vaccine side effects or what they called true stories that may promote hesitancy. So, yeah, you may have a person who gets myocarditis or some other, you know, rare blood disorder as a result of the vaccine. And they might not like that true information. And I'm not like an anti-vax person. I just, I think you should be allowed to publish what's true. But they, they think the public can't handle difficult truths.

And they want to manage that for us, which I think is really scary. Yeah, you know, I wonder about this, too. You get this from the war party all the time, or they just lie all the time, and they don't seem to think that one of the costs of that is being known as a bunch of liars who nobody believes in anymore. It's the same kind of thing with the vaccines. There are plenty of people who are even pro-vaccine. They just don't want to force it on anyone else and couldn't imagine how in the world that they would have the right to.

and then all of those people are smeared as somehow wanting to kill everybody else's grandmother and all the worst people in the world. You can't just tell people who aren't the worst people in the world how deplorable they are all the time when all they're doing is sticking up for what's actually right. Right. And that kind of messaging is, it's so infuriating. You know, I've had to deal with some of it lately in higher quantities than I'm used to. But it's the idea that, for instance, let's say you're opposed to vaccine passports.

I'm opposed to vaccine passports. I think that they're kind of a scary idea, that it's a step in a direction that we don't particularly want to, you know, go in towards something like a social credit system. Like, that would be the fear there. I see the real civil liberties concerns. But I think vaccines work. I vaccinated my kids. But what they're doing is they'll take somebody who's got a political view based on some kind of a principle and they'll try to identify you as supporting this or that cause, a more specific cause based on your endorsement of some kind of general principle, which is insulting. And I think it drives people out of their camp.

And they don't understand that for some reason. Yeah. Now, something that's come up over and over again in these Twitter files is that all these disinformation experts, are the worst liars or at least they're completely stupid and get everything wrong and their whole this thing was really turned i think you guys showed it and maybe it took you a little while for this to kind of come out in the files that this really all started with the consequences of obama's dirty war in syria which led to the rise of the islamic state caliphate so then they had to switch sides on that and they came up with all these programs to try to de-radicalize

people who were watching ISIS videos on YouTube, I guess, and this kind of thing. And then when that sort of petered out, they needed something else to do with it. So they turned it toward enforcing Russiagate, which was a total lie. 10,000 lies on top of each other. Yeah, as Mike Benz from the Foundation for Freedom Online, who's been a really great source for us, but the way he puts it is counterterrorism, the counter-populism, which is really what happened. You had this gigantic machinery that was Pentagon funded or, you know, intelligence funded for years that was designed to do counterproliferation or counterterrorism or

whatever. And when the ISIS threat receded a little bit, all of these people didn't have anywhere to go. So they just kind of move the whole program to anti-disinformation. And the problem with that is, is the whole concept of taking the same tools that you were using to go after suspected members of al-Qaeda and apply it to the domestic population and do it by algorithm you know they made a lot of mistakes doing that but more the biggest one is just that conceptual error of viewing the public as this nefarious uncontrollable enemy which i think they sort of willed into into being you know by doing this yeah that's a very good point and especially when everything is lies.

People believe the earth is flat because the same people who told them it was around or the same people who told them we had to attack Iraq before they attacked us first or whatever other, you know, gigantic pile of lies. People are completely lost. Don't know what's true at all. They know that they don't trust certainly the government. That's good. But they don't trust each other either.

Right. And this is the problem, I think, with the recent Trump prosecution. And, you know, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this. but the because of what you're talking about because the same people who were who were going after him for russia gate and a long series of other investigations that started with something completely bogus let's not forget like there was the whole popadopoulos story then there was the steel dossier and carter page and all those things were total red herrings um that led to the uh the the search of donald trump's lawyer office and then they generated this crazy case that they, you know, they had to basically make a legal argument that it never been made before to charge a felony in this case. I mean, if you're going to do, if you're going to do something as dramatic as indicting your political opposition and, you know, attempting to put an ex-president in jail, it has to be something really

serious and it has to be a really good case. And this plunks both tests, which is going to result in people sort of not believing in the legitimacy of government and fearing it more than they ever have before. Okay, so they got this disinformation complex that, of course, is what it calls everybody else, right? The Ministry of Disinformation are the biggest liars in the country. And they go from attempting to de-radicalize people from joining ISIS to then enforcing Russiagate narratives and enforcing COVID narratives to then, it's the only silver lining on the Ukraine war is they finally shut the hell up about COVID when they switch their subject matter to Ukraine. But now they're determined to enforce their way on Ukraine too. And I wonder, do you have

a lot of examples of that coming up where there's malinformation, true truths about Ukraine that are being censored because of how inconvenient they are? We've already published a couple of them. One of them, we found an intelligence document that was actually intended for, not for Twitter, but for Google and YouTube. And it's kind of an amazing document. It's like a paragraph long. It basically says, we assess that the following accounts were created by the Internet Research Agency and are promoting what they called anti-Ukraine narratives. And then they just had a long list of accounts that they wanted action. And again, this is saying that because something came from a certain source or because it promotes a certain point of view, that it's

actionable or that it's, you know, or it's wrong, which may not be the case. It may be that, you know, the Russians are saying X, Y, and Z. And that may be accurate, right? I mean, you can't just remove something because it happens to conflict with your, you know, your beliefs about the war in Ukraine. And they were already doing that as far back as last year from what we could see. So yeah, I mean, that's, that's definitely a problem. Now, just a few days ago, Musk actually released the source code for Twitter for open inspection. Is that correct? He did. I haven't asked him about this yet, though, so I don't really know what it is. And I've actually been a little bit frustrated because people have been making assumptions about it. What I looked at,

I have a lot of questions because it just shows a list of things that, you know, reportedly are part of the algorithm. There are various groups of content that say things like civic misinfo or it's like Ukraine list or something like that but we don't know what the criteria are for stuff getting on that list i mean it could be what it looks like i don't know but yeah um he did release that but again people wouldn't have heard about that if he hadn't opened the code i i'm a little puzzled by the reaction to that yeah i mean it seems like you know he's opening himself up to being corrected here that here's where the code and after all he inherited the code right he bought this company. He didn't write the code in the first place and all that. And maybe he hasn't

cleaned it up perfectly fast enough yet. I saw the only complaint I saw so far was that there's a scam where people get organized and all mute, block or unfollow someone at the same time that then drives that person's score down and makes them, you know, less visible, that kind of thing. So you could see how, you know, third party actors could say, oh, here's a journalist we don't like. Or here's the point of view we don't like. Everybody follow this guy. And then next Thursday, we're going to all unfollow him at the same time. And that's going to, you know, screw his points out, whatever.

But that's the kind of thing that now can be corrected because people can see it. Right. Which was in the pre kind of Twitter files universe. That was what everybody was wondering about. Like, what kind of shenanigans are going on under the hood at these companies? Is there any way we can ever find out? Because even when it involves your own account, you never know, right? when you ask them.

So, yeah, I mean, he hasn't gone in full kimono, open kimono, but I think he's giving the public more information than it had before. Yeah. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free.

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Their job is solving crimes or if we're talking about the counterintelligence division doing counterintelligence against foreign governments or terrorist groups. Who says they got the right to put their thumb on the scale of who gets to tweet what? Yeah, so there was a law that was. passed in, I think it was 1947, the Smith-Munt Act, and this was after the creation of the original OSS, which was the kind of predecessor

agency to the CIA. And the idea of that original law was to make sure that the agency didn't do a certain kind of propaganda at home. They were not allowed to actively interfere or

in the news environment or promote a certain kind of agenda in at home now the smithmund act has been shipped away at in the year since and i haven't talked to a lawyer in a couple of weeks about this so i'm a little rusty on it but my understanding is that it's been denuded to the point where you can make an argument that they can do this however i still think it goes against the uh the spirit of the law and it's never really been tested like there i mean there are some tests coming up now but i don't think they can do this i think i think it's um If it's not illegal, it should be.

And they, I don't think they think that way either. I think they certainly, from what we've seen, they believe they have every right to interfere massively in the domestic news environment. All right. It's anti-war radio. I'm talking with the great Matt Taiibi from Rackett News about the Twitter files here. And I wanted to ask you about a couple more things here. First of all, we talked before a little bit about how these people,

You know, once they're up and going, and then the problem kind of fades away, they've got to find a new problem instead of going and getting real jobs. So they just kind of go from one thing to another here. And in one of these pieces, I don't know, you write so much, I can't keep track, but you have a whole thing about this NGO industrial complex here, the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic Council. And of course, Hamilton 68, if you could talk a little bit about that, all these sort of, they're not non-governmental organizations. I think someone on Twitter said they're next to government organizations or something like that, right? That's a huge part of this. Civil society organizations. I guess that's one of my talking about it.

Yeah. Well, I think the setup here is there's a think tank in Germany. It's a vehicle that receives money from the U.S. government and other sources, which in turn funnels money to another think tank, like, for instance, the Alliance for securing democracy, which in turn will spend money back. the United States on something like Hamilton 68 and this is what I was talking about about sort of massively interfering in the domestic news environment. Now Hamilton 68, which you mentioned, was a dashboard that was designed by this think tank that supposedly tracked Russian disinformation. It didn't. You know, we found out because we were looking through the Twitter files and they had this list of accounts that were supposedly Russian, they found it. They were

reverse engineered it. And it was just a whole bunch of ordinary people, mostly. But Hamilton 68 was the source for hundreds of news stories. I mean, I'm going on MSNBC today. And in preparation for that, we looked it up. They used this as a source over a hundred times to talk about different bots going after Russian bots doing this and that. So that's, they would call that defensive.

They would say, oh, we're just stopping misinformation from overseas. but actually what they're doing is they're creating fake news here at home. And again, I think that's totally improper and illegal. And, you know, there should be an investigation. Yeah. And now, look, I mean, this whole thing, regardless of what anyone in the audience thinks about Donald Trump, he just never was a Russian Manchurian candidate. That was all made up.

Our guest, Matt Taibi, wrote a book called Insane Clown President, which was obviously by the title, a very ragged. and sober assessment of Donald Trump and his history and personality and who this guy is. But it's just not true all the lies that they told about him. Just the true things. And that matters. And especially when you have the secret police, essentially the FBI's counterintelligence division, accountable to no one, falsely accusing the elected president of the United States of treason.

He won the election. Who the hell are they to try to do that to him? And that's a big deal. it's a it's a huge deal and um you know as a as a reporter it really i'm still not over it frankly you know what happened after 2016 and 2017 when not only the FBI and these other kind of domestic intelligence um agencies went after trump but the press did i mean i think that was the part that really bugged me was they were sort of propagandizing this story that was totally unconfirmable and had obvious holes in it. And if you tried to say that, you were kind of kicked

out of the club a little bit. So they were not only went after Trump, but they undermined things like the free press as a watchdog of the secret police. And they still haven't fixed that problem. Like that was what got broken in Russia Gate has not been fixed. It's been made worse and it's a problem we're still dealing with today. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so you said you're going on MSNBC later today. I'm curious, this is the first time in how long that you've been allowed back on that station? Six years. In six years. Because of this issue, right? Because you went on, the last time you were on there, you said, come on, this isn't real about Russiagate, right? I didn't even say that. I just said, you know, as reporters, we don't have a lot to go on here.

like we have to confirm stuff and we don't have a lot we can confirm and that was apparently taken as you know as kind of a shot at this story interestingly as I was leaving I was on with Chris Hayes that night Rachel came on right after Rachel Maddo and she launched into this monologue that very night basically saying well we can the steel dossier is out there if it was fake the FBI would be saying so and they're not saying anything they're not saying anything like and this became the mantra of how they did reporting going forward like as long as they don't tell us it's fake we can say it's true which is the opposite of how the business used to work you know um so yeah so i i was no longer on air Glenn was no longer Glenn was no longer on air you know

Aaron Mate um all the critics were kicked off and they kind of promoted people like Malcolm Nance to be the spokespeople on this issue. And that's how they do journalism though. So yeah, it's amazing. And now they're, you know, now that their ratings are in the toilet because of that fiasco, I think, you know, now they're coming back and making me a bet noir and all this stuff. It's ridiculous. Yeah. All right. So now let me ask you about this, man. I was whining to you before about how Twitter put a hard limit on my follower account for months. So, but the thing of it is, is I was wondering what it was that got me in trouble back at the end of last May. We launched this massive Twitter campaign, call your congressman to support

the Yemen war powers resolution. And there was a whole campaign about that. And I went trying to find it. But you mentioned somewhere, or one of your partners here mentioned about foreign government influence, I believe mentioned the Saudi kingdom by name of them intervening with Twitter to say, we want less Yemen coverage specifically. And I wonder, is there a way to find out whether that they really were stepping on our Yemen campaign last summer? And that's what happened to my Twitter account when my reach got so crushed like that. Because I was trying to help to lead that.

We could try to find that out. I know there was one, one of the Twitter files people, Lee Fong, was kind of looking at the Saudi question, ran some searches on some Saudi names that, you know, worked at the company. were investors. Remember, I think it's the second largest investor both under the previous regime and now it was a Saudi consortium. So they've had before and still do have a big say in how Twitter is run, or at least they have some. So yeah, that's an interesting question. I haven't looked at it, but we could. We could try. Yeah, and it didn't have to be necessarily about me, but just how about the Yemen can't wait campaign right when things should have been taken off everything went

you know some put sugar on a gas tank you know yeah I mean look my follow account was basically static for years so you know that it's uh you should look into that your own the squashing of you because it's because of Russia gate right and find yourself interested but look you're I mean you got a million some followers now but you had what half a million before all this started at least You have cover story guy at Rolling Stone for, what, 15 years or something like that? So you had a much higher profile than me for them to crush your follower count like that and all that. There's a real plot. There's an email back and forth.

What are we going to do with this Taibi guy? He keeps debunking our Russia Gate narratives. I guarantee you that's in there, man. It could be something algorithmic. You never know. I haven't tried to look. Maybe I should at some point. Get your buddy Schellenberger to do your story for you.

I'll see what he can do. Yeah, there you go. Take the conflict of interest there out. But, you know, look, this whole thing about managing shadow banning people, doing visibility filtering, the one thing I'm glad about is that that was something that we were able to establish definitively right away that they did. You know, so we kind of ended that question of do they do that or not. Now we know. And we just took pictures of it. That was the end of that story.

Well, you know, one narrative two, I do see people complain, and people always assume motive and stupid ways, so never mind that. But I've seen people complain that where's all the coverage of the Israelis and, for that matter, the Americans cracking down on the anti-war left. Because there is, you've got to go to the left of the Democrats, that's for sure. But there is an anti-war left in America and a very pro-Palestine left. and they know from anecdotal history that they got it just as bad as some of these pro-Trump right-wingers did when it came to shadow banning and actual banning.

And so I wonder if you guys got a report coming up on that at some point. I think we're going to try. I mean, the stuff that we've gotten so far, almost all of it was sort of accidental or incidental collection of material as we were trying to look for structural issues. Like, for instance, how does the communication system

between Twitter, the FBI, and the DHS work? How do they talk to each other? Where do complaints go through? Can we find them? Can we not find them? And in the course of looking, trying to answer those questions, we would find individual incidents like Adam Schiff trying to get somebody taken off the site.

And we reported some of that stuff, but mostly we were trying to answer large, larger structural questions. Now, in the course of that, what I can say is we didn't see a whole lot in America about going after the left. We saw a lot of kind of going after Trump followers. We did see it, however, in other countries. Like, there were definitely long lists of accounts that they got from government about people in South America, people in Africa, the yellow vest.

movement. You know, we've seen things about Jeremy Corby, a few Bernie things here and there, but not much. But I'm sure if we looked, I mean, look, we've just looked at a fraction of a fraction of what's there. So it's probably under there somewhere, but it doesn't look to me like it was at the forefront of the executives, the highest executives' minds recently. Okay, that's interesting. And then, you know, I guess the real reason I bring up Israel is obviously they have such an interest in controlling the conversation about the occupation of Palestine and, you know, the BDS movement and all of these things. And just because it's a foreign country. And I'm really curious about, like I was saying with Saudi in the Yemen campaign before,

I'm really interested in this American corporation doing the bidding of foreign sovereigns against American citizens. Yeah, I agree with you. If I had it, I would love to deliver it. I mean, we're somewhat at the mercy of the company in terms of what they give us. It's a question we'd love to answer. We focus first on the United States intelligence agencies and law enforcement and what they were up to and how that worked. But certainly other countries do have some kind, they do have a way to communicate with platforms like Twitter. and some of that is going on outside of, say, the corporate headquarters in America, right? Like, we've seen communications between offices and, you know, Twitter offices in London or other parts of the world and local agencies.

So it's, we don't know how that works yet. I guess my answer to you is I don't, I'm sure Israel is talking, the Israeli government is talking to Twitter and Facebook. I know they talk to Facebook because I've seen reports about that. but we just don't know where those conversations are and how that works and you know what what's being said i've written in the past palestinians are always like the canaries in the coal mine for for internet censorship like whatever tool they invent they're the first people who get it tried out on so i bet if we were to look we'd find it it was done early uh with them like you know 2014 2013 so we'll try but you know that's it's there's a long list of stuff to look for

Man, well, I got to tell you from here, it's absolutely fantastic work. I read every bit of it and all the Twitter threads and racket.com, the great Matt Taibi. His latest book is Hate Inc. all about the media, too. You'll learn a lot from that. Thank you very much, Matt. Appreciate you. Thanks so much, Scott. Take care. All right, y'all. And that has been anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton.

I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.