Twitter files publisher says government was in the censorship business 'in a huge way'

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Twitter files prove government was 'in the censorship business in a huge way': Matt Taibbi

'Griftopia' author Matt Taibbi sounds off on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on what he's learned through releasing Elon Musk's Twitter files.

One of the journalists who helped release Elon Musk's tranche of "Twitter files" said the emails and other documentation he reviewed brought him to conclude the federal government was "in the censorship business."

Taibbi, who a decade ago became well-known through his reportage on the Occupy Wall Street movement, was one of a handful of journalists who tweeted out previously unreported internal records from pre-Elon Musk Twitter.

"I think we can say pretty conclusively, after looking at tens of thousands of emails over the course of these weeks, that the government was in the censorship business in a huge way — that's, I think, provable now," Taibbi told "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

"And not just one agency. Really every conceivable wing of the enforcement agencies of the U.S. government were in some way or another sending moderation requests to Twitter, and in many cases those requests were being fulfilled."

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Matt Taibbi attends the Build Series (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage)

The requests were coming from "everywhere" within the enforcement bureaucracy, he said, naming the NSA, Department of Health and Human Services, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

"We have reports from all over, from states, from police departments — everywhere," he added.

Host Tucker Carlson remarked such behavior would be "prima facie illegal" because government cannot censor political speech.

Twitter, Taibbi said, also had internal guidance in late 2017 that put forward a different public message about content moderation than how it was behaving privately in the wake of "RussiaGate."

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Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images (Photo illustration))

"They had an internal guidance, which I think is very significant, where they said publicly, we will only remove content at our sole discretion. Privately, we will remove any content that's identified by the United States intelligence community as a foreign state actor conducting cyber operations, so if the intel community says we should take it down, we're going to take it down."

Carlson noted that many of those censored through that operation were not foreign actors, but in some cases domestic journalists, going on to ask Taibbi whether pro-free speech or pro-journalism organizations weighed in on his findings.

Taibbi said he regretted none had done so.

"I gave to the ACLU for years. I'm one of those sort of dyed-in-the-wool liberals and grew up that way," he said. 

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Twitter logo (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

"I'm deeply disappointed. I think a lot of people who are sort of politically on that side of the aisle are missing the boat on this. They don't understand the gravity of the situation," he said. "They're thinking about this in partisan terms."

"It's not a partisan story. This is a story about the architecture of the intelligence community and law enforcement getting its hands on speech and on the ability for people to communicate with one another through platforms like Twitter and Facebook."