Matt Taibbi: The authorities' crackdown on social networks began after Trump's election

When Elon Musk purchased the social media company Twitter (later renamed X) in October of 2022, his intentions were clearly stated: he was doing this not to increase his wealth, but to turn Twitter into a global platform for free speech. Having been critical of the company's "content moderation" policies for some years, he immediately, upon concluding the purchase, invited veteran journalist Matt Taibbi and a few other independent journalists to review Twitter's internal correspondence. As Taibbi put it in a recent interview, Musk "wanted the public to know the extent to which platforms like Twitter were censoring their own customers." The result was the now-famous Twitter Files.

At first, says Taibbi, "we only had a very distant idea that there might be some kind of government angle to this." The US legal environment is important here: although social media companies, being private entities, may legally censor content on their platforms, the US Constitution expressly prohibits the government from "abridging the freedom of speech" – i.e. engaging in censorship. Taibbi, therefore, although he did suspect there might be some government influence over what Twitter had been censoring, didn't imagine it could be very extensive. "At the very extreme end, we thought maybe there would be one or two letters from the FBI suggesting [to Twitter to] stay away from this story or that story." What he found was quite different, as you will read below.

On 29 September of this year I attended a rather unusual sort of political rally in Washington DC, where Matt Taibbi was one of many speakers who had come together – from all across the political spectrum – to raise awareness about a number of disturbing political trends in the West. These included the endless stream of American-led foreign wars, the political weaponising of the judicial system ("lawfare"), and the rise of state-sponsored censorship, as governments increasingly seek to "control the narrative". After Taibbi's fiery speech on the perils of modern censorship and the virtues of the American spirit of defiance, I had the chance to ask him just a few questions about his experience working on the Twitter Files.

What's the most egregious thing you found in terms of government interaction with social media companies, especially Twitter?

Well, to get some perspective on this, we can compare it to what happened back in 1989, when the FBI sent a letter to Priority Records, a hip-hop record label, complaining about a song they published. The band was called NWA and the song contained the lyrics "F--- the police", as well as expressions of violence against police. So the FBI sent a letter to the record company and they said, you know, violence is wrong and you shouldn't publish this sort of thing. Basically the FBI was expressing disapproval about the release of the record. It was only one letter to a private company – and it became a major national scandal.

Because it was seen as an attempt at government censorship?

Right. And now, years later, with Twitter, we were looking at thousands of letters – from the FBI, the DHS, the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force – all these different agencies. And they weren't just sending letters – they were sending spreadsheets full of names, one after the other, hundreds, even thousands of accounts. Of course they wouldn't say "Ban this", or "Remove that". What they would say is: "This is for your consideration," or some such phrase.

They were applying pressure.

Exactly. It was understood. So there was that. And then we found out that this same bureaucracy, those same agencies – FBI, DNI [Office of Director of National Intelligence], DHS [Department of Homeland Security] – were having weekly meetings with probably 25 of the biggest Tech platforms, and they were giving briefings about content. This included what they called "OGA briefings", meaning by "Other Government Agencies". So even the CIA was involved in some of these things. It's super creepy.

What time frame are we talking about, when did all this kind of get started?

This really started in 2017, after Trump got elected. The initial excuse was Russiagate – "We need to stop Russian interference" and so forth. Even though Twitter internally had already done an investigation and they were doing something about it. This is actually interesting – Twitter's internal controls for that kind of stuff are actually really good, they were already weeding it out. But the Senate wanted to blow up the issue – and so that's when it actually started. But it really accelerated after 2020.

Why then?

Because of the Hunter Biden laptop story, especially. And then January 6^th was really the thing that accelerated it.

Trump was banned from Twitter after the January 6^th riots, although it's disputed whether he himself did anything to encourage them. In fact I recently saw tweets he sent that day – after people were already storming the Capitol – where he's urging his followers to respect the police and remain peaceful. What can you tell us about Twitter's decision to ban him?

Well, the second, third, and fourth Twitter Files reports are all about how they came to the decision to ban Trump. And really, the key thing to understand is that they didn't have enough to ban him. He hadn't violated their terms of service. So they were scrambling: "What are we going to do? The guy didn't really incite anybody." So they had to redefine "incitement" – basically to define it as a form of "stochastic" terrorism. You know, that concept where if you say something in a certain way, somebody might take it as incitement. And so they were using this holistic idea of what the entirety of your personality, your whole political direction is inciting people to do. And that's what they ultimately did. There's actually a tweet, or a text that we found, where it says: "No Vio" – there's no violation. But they had to come up with something.

Were you able to get access to some of those conversations where they were trying to come up with something?

Oh yeah, we had all that stuff. We had all the company's internal messaging. For a very brief period we were able to look at pretty much everything. And then after that, things got a little more complicated.

What happened after that?

Well, for about a week they just gave us a couple of laptops and said "Search away." So we were looking at everything – you know, Slack chats [internal messaging], everything – for like a sliver of time, for a period of eight months. And then after that, they gave us a new system where you had to submit requests, had to go through lawyers, and everything like that. And then people dropped off the project. It was weird, the whole thing was weird.

What was behind that? Was it Elon Musk?

I don't know. I mean, I can say that Elon was very supportive of the project at first – he never got in the way, never asked what we were doing. He didn't even know what we were looking at, most of the time. But ultimately he did make the decision to pull us all off it.

So, do you think it was pressure again, coming from government agencies?

I can't say. It's odd, though, I will say that. But I think, from his point of view, he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.