The FBI Isn’t The Only Guilty Party In The ‘Twitter Files,’ And It Isn’t ‘Partisan’ To Say So
Matt Taibbi took to Twitter on Saturday to express his frustration with the politicization of the “Twitter Files.” The fact that a considerable number of the responses to the “Twitter Files” has been right-wing political outrage and leftist “whataboutism” has turned it into a “partisan pissing match,” he said. Instead, he would prefer that outrage be directed at the “real targets” of his and his peers’ reporting, the federal bureaucracy and intelligence agencies.
And whereas bureaucrats and spooks alike were exposed for engaging in actual fascism, a truth that Taibbi is clearly uncomfortable with remains: Everything the “Twitter Files” exposed indicates that the federal government and Big Tech colluded to further entrench a despotic regime in accordance with the Democratic Party’s political and ideological goals.
Taibbi’s statement is somewhat puzzling. After all, which political party overwhelmingly benefited from the “meddling” of the intelligence apparatus and Twitter? Which political party’s interests did this meddling explicitly serve? And what political party did the disenfranchised overwhelmingly belong to?
The first installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed that Twitter and the Democrats collaborated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which verifiably altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In it, Taibbi noted that whereas Twitter did take specific content moderation requests from Republicans, the “system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation.”
In a later installment, it was revealed that “the FBI [and] intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and [before] the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop.”
The second installment of the “Twitter Files,” from Bari Weiss, noted that Twitter maintained “blacklists” that “prevent disfavored tweets from trending and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics.” The people on these blacklists were those who publicly, vocally, and effectively opposed regime-friendly messaging. Covid lockdown skeptic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, conservative pundit Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and Libs of TikTok were a sampling of the individuals highlighted in Weiss’s thread.
Further installments revealed that the decision to remove President Donald Trump from the platform after the events of Jan. 6, 2020, came after a series of interactions with the FBI. Taibbi even stated that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive as if it were a subsidiary,” noting that between January 2020 and November 2022, there were “over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth” in which a “surprisingly high number [of emails] are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets.”
It is also made apparent that Twitter allowed lies about Russian collusion in the 2016 election to proliferate on the platform and throttled accounts that were satirically and sincerely critical of the Russia-collusion narrative.
According to Taibbi, his team “didn’t see one reference to [content] moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally.”
Cynical actors and thoroughly leftist outlets such as Rolling Stone insist that requests to remove “death threats aimed at their principals,” outrage at shadowbanning, or even Trump requesting to remove a single tweet from Chrissy Teigen is the equivalent, or worse, than the FBI and Democratic Party collaborating with Big Tech to manipulate our political processes.
They aren’t, and any insistence that they are makes an argument that proves too much: It’s good the FBI is suppressing conservative speech.
Big Tech works to serve the political interests of the Democratic Party and further consolidate the regime’s grip on power. The information Taibbi and his peers’ revealed proves this; they shouldn’t run from the truth.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
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