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“Twitterfiles” Reporter Matt Taibbi Was Just Fired By Elmo Musk For Being Really Bad At His Job

Apr 8, 2023

After pretending to be an unbiased source reporter for Elon Musk AFTER getting to boot from Rolling Stone, after returning from Russia where he wrote stories about sexually assaulting minors, “reporter” for hire, Matt Taibbi has been reduced to whatever one else knew he was, a writer who’ll do anything for a paycheck, without a home.

His last gig as a fake unbiased reporter for Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” ended after Taibbi got crushed for lying about the Twitter files on Thursday when he agreed to debate Mehdi Hassan on his MSNBC show. Hassan came prepared and systematically pointed out where Taibbi lied for effect and was toast. Not only did he admit to shoddy work, he admitted he was wrong, that Elon was wrong, and the Twitter files were an op, but he refused to condemn Elon, like a good soldier.

His reward? Elon blocked Substack links being shared on Twitter, limited Taibbi’s account then unfollowed him to put the nail in Taibbi’s bullshit propaganda coffin.

Elon didn’t like that, so he immediately went to war with Taibbi’s primary source of income, Substack, by blocking any Substack link on Twitter now and forever.

Now THAT’S weird. Either Matt Taibbi thought he and Elon were friends with aligned interests, OR Matt Taibbi was getting paid to carry Elon’s bullshit Twitter files propaganda to the masses as an “unbiased reporter” who just fell out of favor with the meat grinder that is Elon Musk.

TechDirt: Since the interview, Taibbi has been scrambling to claim that the errors Hasan called out are small side issues, but they’re not. They’re literally the core pieces on which he’s built the nonsense framing that Stanford, the University of Washington, some non-profits, the government, and social media have formed an “industrial censorship complex” to stifle the speech of Americans.

As we keep showing, Matt makes very sloppy errors at every turn, doesn’t understand the stuff he has found, and is confused about some fairly basic concepts.

The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (2,890 to be exact).

And they were quite clear in their report on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to track election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they tracked in trying to follow how this information spread, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on.

In total, our incident-related tweet data included 5,888,771 tweets and retweets from ticket status IDs directly, 1,094,115 tweets and retweets collected first from ticket URLs, and 14,914,478 from keyword searches, for a total of 21,897,364 tweets.

Tracking how information spreads is… um… not a problem now is it? Is Taibbi really claiming that academics shouldn’t track the flow of information?

Either way, Taibbi overstated the number of tweets that EIP reported by 21,894,474 tweets. In percentage terms, the actual number of reported tweets was 0.013% of the number Taibbi claimed.

Okay, you say, but STILL, if the government is flagging even 2,890 tweets, that’s still a problem! And it would be if it was the government flagging those tweets. But it’s not. As the report details, basically all of the tickets in the system were created by non-government entities, mainly from the EIP members themselves (Stanford, University of Washington, Graphika, and Digital Forensics Lab).

This is where the second big error that Taibbi makes knocks down a key pillar of his argument. Hasan notes that Taibbi falsely turned the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) into the government agency the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Taibbi did this by assuming that when someone at Twitter noted information came from CIS, they must have meant CISA, and therefore he appended the A in brackets as if he was correcting a typo:

Taibbi admits that this was a mistake and has now tweeted a correction (though this point was identified weeks ago, and he claims he only just learned about it). I’ve seen Taibbi and his defenders claim that this is no big deal, that he just “messed up an acronym.” But, uh, no. Having CISA report tweets to Twitter was a key linchpin in the argument that the government was sending tweets for Twitter to remove. But it wasn’t the government, it was an independent non-profit.

The thing is, this mistake also suggests that Taibbi never even bothered to read the EIP report on all of this, which lays out extremely clearly where the flagged tweets came from, noting that CIS (which was not an actual part of the EIP) sent in 16% of the total flagged tweets. It even pretty clearly describes what those tweets were:

Compared to the dataset as a whole, the CIS tickets were (1) more likely to raise reports about fake official election accounts (CIS raised half of the tickets on this topic), (2) more likely to create tickets about Washington, Connecticut, and Ohio, and (3) more likely to raise reports that were about how to vote and the ballot counting process—CIS raised 42% of the tickets that claimed there were issues about ballots being rejected. CIS also raised four of our nine tickets about phishing. The attacks CIS reported used a combination of mass texts, emails, and spoofed websites to try to obtain personal information about voters, including addresses and Social Security numbers. Three of the four impersonated election official accounts, including one fake Kentucky election website that promoted a narrative that votes had been lost by asking voters to share personal information and anecdotes about why their vote was not counted. Another ticket CIS reported included a phishing email impersonating the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that was sent to Arizona voters with a link to a spoofed Arizona voting website. There, it asked voters for personal information including their name, birthdate, address, Social Security number, and driver’s license number.

In other words, CIS was raising pretty legitimate issues: people impersonating election officials, and phishing pages. This wasn’t about “misinformation.” These were seriously problematic tweets.

Matt cut his teeth at Exile Magazine in Russia, where he and his co-author “Exile” allegedly harassed and had sex with employees and underage hookers. He changed the book category from non-fiction to fiction last year when people started asking Taibbi about the first-hand accounts during his time in Russia. He’s no stranger to lying, controversy, or picking a side for a paycheck. That’s what happened here.

Matt, Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss were all “selected” to deliver a narrative about government interference on behalf of the woke left. Elon personally oversaw the release of select information to help build that narrative, and Taibbi used numbers and reports built on adding an extra letter to acronyms of nonprofits to make it look like a government agency, then swapped out real numbers from other ledgers to present the ticket requests to remove specific tweets as government related.

He lied at Elon’s direction. And I’m guessing he was paid for it. His performance on MSNBC and the COMPLETE unmasking of his work as fiction irked Elon, so Elon cut bait and penalized him, Bari Weiss and anyone else who makes a living at Substack may or may not be associated with Elon’s fake Twitter files Operation.

https://twitter.com/DoYouHaveData/status/1644450691820187650?s=20

Matt, like Aaron Mate’ and a few others, presents themselves as centrist or unbiased, but they ALL get taken care of regarding specific narrative-based work. This is where influencing gets fucking dark. Former “reporters” whose ideologies align with financial opportunity.

Taibbi is over. The Twitter files are what we all knew they were: Elon’s contribution to his fascist friends’ attempt to misdirect and control your emotions and objective reality.

Bari Weiss is next.

 

 

 

Dean Blundell

Dean Blundell is a Canadian radio personality. Best known as a longtime morning host on CFNY-FM (The Edge) in Toronto, Ontario. In 2015 he was named the new morning host on sports radio station CJCL (Sportsnet 590 The Fan). Dean started his career in radio in 2001 and for nearly 20 years been entertaining the radio audience. Dean’s newest venture is the launch of his site and podcast which is gaining tremendous momentum across North America.

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