Coop Scoop: The Very Wrong Elon Musk- Matt Taibbi Conspiracy Theory

No, Liberals, Democrats and Spooks Did Not Use Twitter Against Trump

January 19, 2023

Marc Cooper

Greetings from Santiago, Chile where I arrived last week and will be staying thru the first days of February.  I’m gathering material for some work I will publish next month of the first year of the Boric government and on the 50 year legacy of General Pinochet. That has not kept me from keeping an eye on goings on back home and, therefore, this missive:

I swore I would not write anything about the brouhaha around Twitter, cooked up by Elon Musk and a couple of journalists picked by him to do his dirty work, primarily Matt Taibbi (for whom I USED to have a certain modicum of respect). 

But there is some new information out that gives the lie to their frenzied “Twitter Files” and I believe that is worth spilling a few words about.

Just in case you don’t know, Taibbi and others were given or allowed to cherry pick numerous internal documents from Twitter made available by Musk.  I absolutely refuse to submerge myself again in that swamp of words, innuendo and outright bullshit therein.  You are free to paw through it yourself on Twitter. It’s easy to find as Musk has made sure to give it the maximum hype.

I will roughly summarize it by saying that Musk has a clear agenda to become a tribune of the Trumpy right and to use his platform to aggressively trash what he sees as the evil axis of Democrats, liberals and “woke” progressives.  This should be of little surprise because this is the very definition of an Oligarch…a very rich person who controls major media and uses it to influence not only his economic reach but also national politics.  This is what Russian ‘garchs do.  This is what our American ‘garch does.

What caught some by surprise was the egregious participation of writer Matt Taibbi in this process, a journalist who had a record of critical reporting on the wealthy.  But Taibbi had been moving politically into the oddball camp of Glenn Greenwald in which Public Enemy #1 are simply Democrats and where their number one issue is censorship on the web…as if large social media entities could or should jettison any notion of content moderation (a ridiculous goal).

As I slogged thru the Taibbi-written Twitter threads, I was unimpressed from the get-go.  The material was incomplete and the conclusions were wildly exaggerated as he attempted to prove that a cabal of liberal Twitter employees aided by shadowy figures from three letter state agencies unfairly discriminated against conservative users and blocked or downplayed their posts and in many cases suspended their accounts.  Needless to say, most of those “discriminated” against were insurrectionists, hate-mongers, racists, neo-Nazis, peddlers of quack information about vaccines, and ultimately, former President Trump whose account was shut down two days after he incited the violent siege of the Capitol (and veritably all of whom have been gleefully reinstated by Musk).

The more I read about these “atrocities” the more sympathy I gathered for the former Twitter folks who were able to sort out this toxic crap and can it.  Nobody, especially Musk, has yet found the most efficient way to fairly moderate a massive social media network but what Taibbi’s threads made unwittingly clear was that Twitter had been struggling to do so, making some honest mistakes along the way, but nevertheless giving it a good try with minimum resources.

That’s hardly the conclusion that the Musk-Taibbi duo reached.  They asserted that they had “proven” that pre-Musk Twitter was more or less a puppet of nefarious liberals who were trying to skew the national dialogue to the left and now they have come perilously close to inventing one more conspiracy theory i.e. that Twitter had more or less thrown the 2020 election unfairly to Biden, snatching victory from Trump.

All you have to do is read the replies to Taibbi’s threads to see the orgasmic embrace given this crap by literal hordes of explicit alt-right, election denying, anti-vax, racist, fascist adjacent loons, kooks, and screwballs who constitute the cheering section of the Twitter Files.  Musk must feel quite self-satisfied even if he is driving the platform into the ground.  As to the once reliable Taibbi, he has shredded his credibility and is either experiencing temporary insanity or has become a cynical grifter, chalking up thousands of new pro-Trump paying subscribers to his substack (I lean toward the latter).

All of which brings us to an actual, well-reported, fully documented piece of journalism (unlike Taibbi’s slap dash hodgepodge) that appeared last week in the Washington Post and –inadvertently mind you – completely and utterly destroyed the main thrust of the Twitter Files.

The story is based on a 122 page internal memo developed by the January 6 committee that, after arduous and lengthy investigation, revealed the role that big social media, including Twitter, played in fomenting the attack on the capitol.  That memo wound up being basically deleted in the final report by the committee out of fear of delving too deep into the rise of violent extremism and by not wanting to provoke a nasty debate with big tech companies.

Here are a couple of key graphs from the Washington Post piece:

“Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

This truth is the complete opposite of the Musk-Taibbi propaganda that the Twitter Files claim.

This damning material was mostly excluded by the final report of the Jan6 committee thanks to pressure applied by Liz Cheney to keep a narrow focus on Donald Trump himself and to not delve deeply on the roots and networks of domestic extremism. 

More from the Post:

Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions — an allegation that has gained new attention recently as Musk has promoted a series of leaked internal communications known as the “Twitter Files.” The transcripts indicate the reverse, with former Twitter employees describing how the company gave Trump special treatment. [emph. added]

Twitter employees, they testified, could not even view the former president’s tweets in one of their key content moderation tools, and they ultimately had to create a Google document to keep track of his tweets as calls grew to suspend his account.

“ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee, who testified to the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson.

There is much much more damning detail in the Washington Post story which really deserves a very close read that I fully encourage. I could continue parsing it out but the main point is clearly stated above.

All in all, the Twitter Files have accomplished very little other than throwing more fuel on the fires of unhinged conspiracy theories.  Musk has reportedly lost some $200 billion in the past few months as he has ignored serious problems at Tesla while spending his time on Twitter calling to jail Dr. Fauci among other gross stupidities. And Matt Taibbi? What a disgraceful fail and fall. ++

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