Leftists have been going ballistic over Elon Musk’s release of “The Twitter Files” — and particularly over journalist Matt Taibbi’s viral tweet thread about them Friday.
What’s the background?
The trove of internal emails details Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election. One showed that members of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s inner circle reached out to Twitter and asked the social media giant to “review” tweets — after which Twitter deleted them.
While Taibbi noted that those working for then-President Donald Trump also had access to Twitter for such requests, which Twitter also honored, it wasn’t an equal enterprise.
“This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” Taibbi explained.
What was the reaction?
As you might expect, certain folks weren’t happy with Taibbi:
- “Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world,” NBC senior reporter Ben Collins tweeted. “Humiliating s**t.”
- “Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day,” Daily Best columnist Wajahat Ali noted. “Should be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth. Well, he’ll eat well for the rest of his life I guess. But is it worth it?”
- “It’s true: in 2014, I taught Matt Taibbi keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste,” CNN correspondent Elspeth Reeve revealed. “If I had not done that, maybe all this could have been averted. I am deeply sorry.”
- “Matt Taibbi is very upset that the Biden campaign asked a platform to take down some revenge porn targeting the candidate’s son,” MSNBC analyst Tim Miller tweeted. “I’m sure Matt would be totes cool with people tweeting out his adult kids d**k bc they didn’t like him and would not ask his buddy Elon to help.”
- “Matt Taibbi always was, and still remains, a fraud,” Democratic pollster and strategist Matt McDermott noted. “Doing PR for the richest person in the world should come as no surprise.”
- Oh, and Cliff Schecter — an ad writer for the 2020 Biden campaign — offered the following unsurprising take: “Forget any ‘Just Say No’ or ‘This Is Your Brain On’ ad, instead show folks the before and after writing & critical thinking skills of Matt Taibbi.”
(H/T: The Daily Caller)