Matt Taibbi's expose' of Twitter's catastrophic internal meltdown

As operatives did an end run around then-CEO Jack Dorsey, Democratic legislators urged that "the First Amendment isn't absolute"

At 4:39 p.m. today U.S. Mountain Time, Matt Taibbi—fresh off cleaning Malcolm Gladwell’s intellectual clock in Toronto—posted a cryptic update to his subscribers. As this went out, Taibbi was busy posting a Twitter thread describing his review of internal Twitter e-mails from October 2020, when the New York Post reported that a stank-ridden laptop belonging to the son of then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had washed up at a Delaware repair shop.

You can read Taibbi’s thread without visiting Twitter here.

In August, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook had squashed the story—which of course turned out to be true—at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Taibbi discovered that the mishandling of the Post story at Twitter was quite different.

Thanks in large part to the extraordinarily diabolical efforts of two since-removed operatives—head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde and trust and safety chief Yoel Roth—dissent among some of the company’s top decision-makers didn’t keep Twitter from declaring the Post story, on no evidence, to have likely resulted from the work of hackers and therefore unfit for public consumption.

How could a company behave in so recklessly partisan a manner? Well…

Roth in particular is a real piece of work.

I don’t care that Roth is gay, “extremely fucking Jewish” while being averse to white people, is a standard Wokish feminist, and equates Trump supporters with actual Nazis; a disproportionate number of my friends fall into some of these categories. But in his case, his beliefs obviously informed how he did his job, and establish how he’ll function in any similar capacity if permitted.

After Roth was relieved of his post by Elon Musk, he took to The New York Times to cheerfully describe all the ways coercion and legislation could be used to fight what he sees as society’s greatest enemy: Freedom of speech.

Fuck this flaming asshole. What country does he think this is?

In the darkest part of the thread, Roth seems to draw support from Democratic legislators. Below is an excerpt from a letter sent to Twitter by Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice in the wake of the suppression of the laptop story, after Szabo had contacted various members of U.S. Congress.

Taibbi also notes the direct line of communication—it’s almost comical—from the White House to Twitter in the years since; the company has routinely agreed to requests from Team Biden to remove specific tweets or ban specific accounts, many of them liberal-leaning.

Taibbi says he’ll have more about how Twitter manipulated its overall online environment via “shadow banning” and other undisclosed practices in days to come, probably on his blog.

This is another good time for me to emphasize that I could never possibly vote for anti-First Amendment politicians, especially ones who already practice as much censorship as they can get away with and smell blood every day. I honestly don’t know how anyone with a brain can even tolerate the fact that Joe Biden is still in office, and I have now helped put him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue three times.

I’ve always been startled by the lack of buyer’s remorse in politics. People will divorce a spouse several years after a grand $25,000 wedding, or change colleges despite having a tattoo of the mascot from the original one on their ankle, or shit on longtime favorite sports teams when they start to suck. Yet almost no one can admit that they voted for asshats, and I really don’t think the fact that Republicans are also worthless, and in some cases evil, lets anyone off the hook here.

I guess some folks don’t want to alienate almost all of their own friends, so they go on optionally buying into dumber and dumber media and government narratives, hoping at some dim level it’s all an illusion and the rich fucks who really run the country are different from other morbidly despotic humans.

Substack would probably disappear tomorrow if someone like Bill Gates could take control of it. The government is already trying. Then you wouldn’t be able to read shit like this anywhere, and some of you might start to figure out why I was so damned obsessed with speech suppression.

No one trying to curb the flow of information by force is ever in the right, even in the few if any instances in which they can claim the upper moral hand in whatever is central to the dispute.

Ever.