Matt Taibbi in front of Congress today—Free Speech

[bigsky]

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love. I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack.

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:

Or:

Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.

This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.

Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we’ve summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi.

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”

Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.

Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.

But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.

Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.

Some will say, “So what? Why shouldn’t we eliminate disinformation?”

To begin with, you can’t have a state-sponsored system targeting “disinformation” without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict.

Many of the fears driving what my colleague Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” also inspired the infamous “Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.” The latter outlawed “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president.”

Here is something that will sound familiar: supporters of that law hundreds of years ago were quick to denounce their critics as sympathizers with a hostile foreign power, at the time France. Alexander Hamilton said Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were “more Frenchmen than Americans.”

Jefferson, in vehemently opposing these laws, said democracy cannot survive in a country where power is given to people “whose suspicions may be the evidence.” He added:

It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.

Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy.

This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.

We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we’re now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab “disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI takes it seriously.

It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.

This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.

For hundreds of years, the thing that’s distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we don’t let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government.

The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere.

If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I would be happy to answer any questions from the Committee.

[bigsky]

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.“

Democrats are calling Matt and Bari, both about as “conservative” as I am, “scribes for Elon Musk”, himself not very conservative either.

[VirginiaCat]

Thomas Jefferson is still the smartest POTUS to every be, and maybe the smartest American.

Matt is not a conservative in any fashion..but he is what every american should want a journalist to be.

[dan_bgblue]

but he is what every American should want a journalist to be.

Diligent, honest, and unbiased are adjectives that come to mind.

One other comment is that his writings appear more conservative than anything that is part of the Biden administration, or the fast becoming Woke Military.

[dan_bgblue]

The house members got a bit testy.....................

The house members are not playing nice with each other

[dan_bgblue]

206 Democrats vote against bill banning federal officials from policing online speech

[VirginiaCat]

Placksik is a Fing idiot.

[CitizenBBN]

"It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at."

This.

How was Covid lab theory "disinformation" when clearly we didn't know enough to know if it was or wasn't true? It was just ruled "disinformation" by the Powers That Be, and that was supposed to be the end of it. Pharaoh has spoken!

It's scary how many are just going along with this outrage. Stunning in fact. Do leftists need to feel like sheep to sleep at night or something? Do they live in some kind of fear that they may be wrong and if they hear enough people say something different they may realize it? What is this religious drive to repress anyone who dares dissent?

Liberty will die not with a murmur, but with thunderous applause from the Left.

[bigsky]

“Liberty will die not with a murmur, but with thunderous applause from the Left.”

Well done. And a bit of it gone every day

[CitizenBBN]

It's hard to believe this is the same political party that is the roots of the ACLU and spent the 60s fighting for free speech and civil rights.

It's proof everything you need to know about political economy you can learn in Animal Farm. When the Left was the voice being squelched they were dead set against silencing people. now that they have power to silence people they are all in on it.

[bigsky]

The two who testified were slandered. From Michael Shellenberger:

“Yesterday we helped break what could be the most important story of the year, if not the decade: U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation, have been financing and working private sector entities to secretly censor ordinary Americans.

Michael and Friend of Public Matt Taibbi testified before the House Committee on the Weaponization of Government about our findings. Did the Democrats respond by thanking us for exposing this imminent threat to the First Amendment? They did not.

Rather, Democrats spent the hearing impugning our motives and calling us “so-called journalists.”

Happily, the Republicans on the committee showed appropriate levels of alarm and promised to investigate our charges.

The highlight of the hearing came when Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) asked Michael about how he got involved in the Twitter Files. After Michael explained that our friend, Bari Weiss, invited us in, Rep. Garcia said, “So you’re in this as a threesome?””

[bigsky]

Bari Weiss of course quit a career job at the New York Times after being harassed and silenced for not being woke enough. She’s a married lesbian. And roughly as conservative as Hilary Clinton. And, yesterday, as you see, a democrat Congresswoman speculated on the record about the possibility that she had sexual activities with two men. Because she dared to expose what went on in the federal government’s efforts to suppress informed speech by americans.

Shellenberger’s “and all true” in reference to being asked about the Clinton hack’s information was on target and one of the best moments of the hearing.

The woke are squelching your rights in schools, and in universities, and on your jobs, and in your non profits and churches and sports activities. You can’t speak truth and they can say ANYTHING. They are so used to doing it that now they have extended it to the public forum, and it is happening

This is the country we live in. Try mentioning the murder of Ashli Babbit and see what happens. The same as saying the lab leaked the virus or men should not compete in women’s sports.

Fight the power!

[bigsky]

“The irony is that what Goldman was doing, confusing accusations with proof — as Thomas Jefferson said, the phenomenon of people whose “suspicions may be evidence” — was the entire reason for the hearing. Michael and I were trying to describe a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces. I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified. But by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.

Yesterday was memorable for other reasons, but a depressing eye-opener as well, forcing me to see up close the intellectual desert that’s spread all the way to the edges within the party I once supported. There are no more pockets of Wellstones and Kuciniches who were once tolerated and whose job it is to uphold a constitutionalist position within the larger whole. That crucial little pocket of principle is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.“

I subscribe to Taibbi and this is an excerpt from a piece for subscribers only. Obviously, the original post is from his public testimony and public domain. In this excerpt he is no less critical of democrats than I am, or Citizen.

Democrats have lost their last pocket of principle and become an authoritarian nightmare, worshipping their desired outcome and justifying any means to get there.

[dan_bgblue]

This is a long read and it shares the opinions of liberals and a conservative or two in response to an opinion piece in the Chattanooga newspaper concerning the death of Ms Babbit and the activities at the Nation's capital on Jan 6th.

It is a disturbing exchange of disparate opinions.

https://www.chattanoogan.com/2023/3/...And-Ashli.aspx

[bigsky]

You'll notice the mindreading going on by the one camp, explaining that the other guy doesn't have all the facts and watches too much Fox news and tucker carlson. They do not know that, but it is a form of ad hominem attack.

The facts are relatively simple, Ashli Babbit was shot, from ambush, without warning, for the crime of, as expressed by the one letter writer, "trespassing". People who shoot people for trespassing from ambush without warning, are arrested and tried for some version of manslaughter. There's a place down the Boulder here in Montana, with "trespassers will be shot" among other signs. We call their gate across the driveway, "the hate gate". The hate for veteran Ashli Babbit is considerable and that really is the a clear division in this country. People forget or ignore that the capitol civil unrest was preceded by a long summer and fall of riots and building burnings in Portland, and Wisconsin, statues torn down, and other massive acts of more civil disobedience. That set a standard the capitol unrest followed. Several demonstrators died at the capitol unrest. No policemen died that day. The policeman that did die the next day died of natural causes, not a bullet or after being bashed by a fire extinguisher.

Elected officials are not untouchables. We are not surrounded by a golden fence from constituents. I watched Senator Max Baucus go into a large crowd of very similar demonstrators, anti government, right wing, and have a civil conversation. When I asked him, he said, "if you think about it, that is the job".

Much of what happened and expressed in DC is an expression and feeling that elected and unelected bureaucrats are untouchable. We also saw this in Canada, where truckers had their bank accounts stolen by the Canadian federal govt. There is nothing untoward about americans showing up and protesting in DC. The million man march. The VietNam mayday protests. The prolife protests. The pink pussy hats. The difference really has been the escalation in violence by the antifa and the standard that has set.

[dan_bgblue]

Exceptionally well said, with multiple examples cited. You could do that for a living I think.

[dan_bgblue]

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