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It is strange Matt Taibbi forgot to find out about how Donald Trump did 'exact same stuff' [1]
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Date: 2023-03-09
The report by Rolling Stone details some already known attempts at stifling actual free speech, such as Donald Trump being butt hurt by model Chrissy Teigen back in 2019. A former top aide to a senior Trump official told the magazine, “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office]. It was normal.”
The problem is that Taibbi has pretended the entire time that the coordinated release of what is clearly a cherry-picked list of government involvement with Twitter is the real story. He has not blinked when asked how it is that the actual political administration in power during the lion’s share of his reported findings is somehow absent from the results. He continuously mentions how he provided a single tweet about a single instance of the Trump administration trying to get Twitter to suspend or ban a post (while also dedicating three or more tweets in the same thread to someone asking that a picture of Hunter Biden’s genitalia be taken down).
He won’t go so far as to say there is no evidence, just that he hasn’t seen it. So even though this means that Taibbi only saw what he was allowed to see by a guy who is clearly a right-wing, tech-bro bigot billionaire, Taibbi has continued to pretend that there is nothing problematic, let alone obviously propagandist, about this situation.
The kind of journalist Taibbi once was seems to be missing in this equation. Given the chance to go through a lot of archives showing emails and text threads and Slack channel interactions between government officials and a big communications company, it should have been more than concerning that the source of this information was a billionaire with questionable politics. It’s even more concerning that the billionaire offered up seemingly nothing on the actual administration in office at the time the practice was happening. Like, nothing at all.
At the very least, even if you honestly believed that the Trump administration just never got around to contacting Twitter about such things,* it would be quite the story that the acting president and his entire branch of government, as well as the Republican-led Senate, were completely in the dark about all of this moderating and gaming going on behind the scenes.
If Taibbi is solely interested in bringing more transparency to big companies and their relationships with our intelligence community and the government, omitting the entire executive branch (and the Senate and the House) from that reporting is one or both of these: completely disingenuous journalism or incompetent journalism.
*Forget about the fact that the Twitter platform was Donald Trump’s single most important avenue of communication with the world (and possibly with other world leaders).
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/9/2157187/-It-is-strange-Matt-Taibbi-forgot-to-find-out-about-how-Donald-Trump-did-exact-same-stuff
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