Matt Taibbi
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Taibbi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They're very mad about it. And then, sorry, just to finish off the censorship thing, that is going to be a major investigation. There's at least two that I know of that are already underway. You know, the government affair, the Rand Paul's committee, the government oversight committee in the Senate,
They really want to do a big thing, like a government files type of thing, where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically. And I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved there. in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence, and we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it. And I think what's going to come out is...
how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it, how many people were committed to that effort. Also, were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Um, was the state department doing that? Uh, you know, I think, so there's going to be a big followed it.
The digital services act is like the, it's like the wet dream of every sensor in the world, right? Basically it mandates that every, uh, internet platform, uh,
abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on at things on social media and if they see a narrative that they don't like um they will elevate it to the platform if the platform does not abide by the recommendations they get crippling enormous fines and this is one of the reasons why there was a
dispute between Elon Musk and Europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely enough. This just came into effect last year, but it's an extremely effective way to regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits the censorship. And this third-party methodology, which is
specifically by the way what uh what donald trump referenced in his free speech executive order we we don't want that to happen we're gonna not allow that uh they already have the full-blown death star version in europe of that right and so the investigation here in the united states is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing
The Twitter file suggested that we were already doing it informally and illegally, probably, but we want to find out exactly. With Snopes and all the other fact-checkers? Yes, all the fact-checking organizations, right? You know, sometimes that was done informally, by inference. Or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations.
But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement Center or the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force making direct recommendations to these platforms, or the White House in your case. Yeah, we're going to find out all of these communications, not just little pieces of them.
Yeah, I mean, Wikipedia has a very advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages. If it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the real clear politics... You know, polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades.
They kind of left it off their their page of polling average sites because they didn't like the page, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there. Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a senior position in NPR. The deputy or the COO... One government media job to another. Yeah, exactly.
And the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is one of the groups that we investigated in the Twitter files. It was sort of heavily into this whole... Content moderation questions. So the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff, that's probably going to come out too.
Right, yeah, exactly, yeah. Walter Pincus, right?
Isaacson, sorry.
Can you cut that? Sorry.
Yeah, no, it is weird. The Aspen Institute, I mean, they played a very strange role in the whole censorship story, but yeah. Yeah.
They're going to struggle, I think, to get audience back. You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they betrayed previously. funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live, you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow.
It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, OK, we're going to suck up to this group now. Right. As opposed to the other one, which is so loathsome. Right. And that was Rachel Maddow was not the core.
Of course. And my only point is that... just by changing the direction of their BS, they're not going to win back audience, right? And this is something that I've noticed since I've been in the business. People in media continually underestimate audiences. They think that they're much stupider than they really are.
Showing 161–180 of 209 · page 9 of 11
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