If you didn't have a chance to watch the testimony from Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi before the Weaponization of Federal Government subcommittee this week, I have good news. Journalist and author Matt Taibbi just published his opening remarks to the committee, and you can read for yourself how he's an unbiased, truth-telling journalist.
Even though Democrats on the committee accused Matt and Michael of being on Elon Musk's payroll when they testified, the truth is that both journalists have reported with objectivity and haven't allowed their political leanings to influence their stories.
The attempts to slander both reporters' credibility is a typical move from the left to deflect from the realities of the situation. The truth is that the federal government conspired with Twitter to censor and suppress the free speech of Americans who questioned the status quo. For more than a year, posting articles on Twitter or Facebook that were critical of the Covid vaccines or mask mandates would run the risk of getting banned from the social media sites.
Ask yourself if this behavior is that of a “platform for free speech” that these social media companies have labeled themselves as. Perhaps Matt Taibbi put it best in his testimony when he said, “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.”
If you would like to read Matt's opening statements in full, please click this link. An excerpt of his statement before Congress can be found below:
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.
