Taibbi: US Senator Wanted ZeroHedge Banned From Twitter

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he has continued to keep his promise of transparency with regard to the company’s past behavior

Thanks to the revelations in the so-called  ‘Twitter Files’, we have seen clear evidence that the FBI and other three-letter agencies worked directly with various social media entities to suppress perfectly “lawful speech” for purely political reasons.

Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.

And yet, as Matt Taibbi writes, these extremely newsworthy revelations…

2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”: pic.twitter.com/njklzvX0n1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

…have produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months.

Something he discussed with Joe Rogan this past week…

However, as Taibbi notes, House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.

The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!

And so, Taibbi throws down the gauntlet in the latest ‘Twitter Files’, “purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area”…

5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?

Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:

• “Rand Paul visit excitement”

• “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”

• Being followed by rival Eric Brakey

• Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”

Taibbi notes that King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like:

Read the full (rather lengthy) spreadsheet here in a Google doc to see if you’re on ‘the list’.

Yes, the Maine Senator demanded @ZeroHedge (and 100s more) Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (and Facebook Groups) be instantly removed for being “suspicious”.

As one wit on Twitter responded via DM when we remarked on Senator King’s actions: “the f**king balls on these people!!”

We could not have said it better.

As Matt writes in a follow-up…

One of the funniest things about the @SenAngusKing suspicious accounts list is that they seemed to think @zerohedge is a bot. https://t.co/2jiOKvpc9o

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

Taibbi concludes the latest tweet thread with a big reality-check slap to the face of the mainstream media

The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they’re about.

Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.

The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that’s not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.

Beginning in March, we’ll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

All of which, roughly translated, sounds like – look out MSM, there’s so much more to come that you will never get away with not covering it! We won’t hold our collectively censored breaths but with Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others on the forensic case, we suspect the run up to the 2024 election will be a little more ‘free’ than the run-up to the 2020 election.