1.TWITTER FILES #19
The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine
Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
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Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
Author of GRIFTOPIA, THE DIVIDE, THE BUSINESS SECRETS OF DRUG DEALING, and HATE INC. racket.news
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I didn’t say anything. Check back and see if I’ve ever once talked out of school about someone I’ve worked with on a story, for any reason.
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Replying to @MattBinder
Matt believes that when he decides to leave twitter it is an example of government censorship.
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You always needed a subscription, for most of them.
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Replying to @mtaibbi
Tell us what this means for reading your articles. We need a au stack subscription?
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Since sharing links to my articles is a primary reason I come to this platform, I was alarmed and asked what was going on. I was given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead.
I’m obviously staying at Substack, and will be moving to Substack Notes next week.
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Of all things: I learned earlier today that Substack links were being blocked on this platform.
When I asked why, I was told it’s a dispute over the new Substack Notes platform…
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. has blocked me -- so much for winning every argument -- so hopefully others can ask him if he will retract his false claims about Matt's reporting.
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Which I admitted, confusing CIS/CISA in one tweet, but CISA was a partner to EIP and @mehdirhasan should acknowledge this. twitter.com/bjm1203/status…
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They have never addressed a single problem with any of their Trump-Russia stories and after I exposed the Hamilton 68 scam - which was a staple for them - they said nothing.
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If you aren't print news, then you probably have had quite a few people on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC...etc. that have said incorrect statements. Some I expect have been retracted and others one would reasonable assume, they did not retract. They are all 24 hr networks, not surprising
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Which I admitted, confusing CIS/CISA in one tweet, but CISA was a partner to EIP and should acknowledge this.
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CISA absolutely was a partner of the EIP, as notes. Are you going to fix this, ?
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MSNBC Mentions Hamilton 68 Over 100 Times: List
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Let's talk a bit about corporate media v. independent media and which is and isn't journalistically trustworthy:
This article by contains just a small sample of the outright lies and fabrications aired by MSNBC over the years: not a single one of which was retracted:
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The decision by to pull a pure ad hominem interview, with no purpose but to attack me personally to deflect attention from what we’ve found, reveals him to be the latest in a long line of security-state attack dogs at whose job is to obscure damaging truths.
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No, I will not take the L.
A misplaced acronym and a wrong date don’t invalidate the months of important work nearly a dozen journalists, including , and myself, put in so that the public could see the breadth of a state censorship program. (1/2) twitter.com/prouddemvotebl
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The entire point of was that ethics required that I criticize Elon Musk on Modi, as if it were a given that I should, if I’m writing about U.S. speech. Meanwhile, he didn’t address MSNBC errors uncovered in the #TwitterFiles, as he grilled me about the TwitterFiles.
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Replying to @mtaibbi and @mehdirhasan
Dude, know when to stay down after an ass whooping and don’t tweet drunk
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“I never wrote about Hunter Biden, so maybe you should apologize to me.”
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.@mtaibbi reminds @mehdirhasan that MSNBC spread the lie that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
Mehdi says: "I never said a word about the Hunter Biden story." That's not true, but say it were: he's admitting to staying quiet on a scam that enabled censorship.
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This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the gov contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach
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"In fact you added an 'A' to 'CIS'... in brackets!"
cc @PulitzerPrizes
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We’ve got a video coming out of MSNBC falling for the Hamilton 68 fraud over 100 times, but even that pales in comparison to broader errors about the Steele dossier, the Nunes memo, “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, and more: racket.news/p/msnbc-sucks
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Replying to @mtaibbi and @mehdirhasan
I assume that you can't provide any evidence of these alleged "huge mistakes", Matt.
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“I never said a word about the Hunter Biden story,” says stickler-for-facts . But he did: twitter.com/aaronjmate/sta
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.@mtaibbi reminds @mehdirhasan that MSNBC spread the lie that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
Mehdi says: "I never said a word about the Hunter Biden story." That's not true, but say it were: he's admitting to staying quiet on a scam that enabled censorship.
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As opposed to Malcolm Nance?
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Replying to @mtaibbi @mehdirhasan and @realDonaldTrump
You haven’t been invited back because you are not a credible or trusted source of information.
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Here’s justifying a deliberate intelligence deception - that the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation. MSNBC offended twice, reporting it and employing signatories to the infamous intel community open letter, like Jeremy Bash and John Brennan.
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Replying to @aaronjmate @mtaibbi and @mehdirhasan
you want Mehdi to apologize for something he did not do nor was at MSNBC at the time?
is that what you're suggesting?
you realize how boneheaded that sounds?
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In response to 's attempted scolding, says:
"The hilarity of this coming from MSNBC which did nothing but vomit up fake Russiagate stories... that you guys still haven't apologized for."
Mehdi's defense: "I wasn't there in that period."
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Regarding the 22 million tweets, here is an explanation from former State Department official and cybersecurity analyst Mike Benz:
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This is completely false. Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright. Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.
The 3000 URLs he is anchoring you to were sent as samples for censorship guidance to squash millions of related posts. twitter.com/alexstamos/sta…
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Also today: I was given a hard time for saying it was an “honor” to speak to congress. said it wouldn’t have been an honor to speak to the House Un-American Affairs Committee, incredible given it was clearly Democrats who acted like HUAC members that day.
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I don’t need to address his issue. I’m responsible for the things I write and cover. The “What about Modi”? questions were an attempt to get me to participate in deflecting attention from my own reporting. If he wanted to engage in that material, that’s one thing, but he didn’t.
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As every responsible journalist does, I make corrections as soon as I become aware of them and don’t ever delete editors’ notes. Again: unlike the network I was on today, which didn’t have me on for six years, avoiding my many published questions about their Russia reporting. twitter.com/pnwarchitect/s
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Does believe the information in this Twitter Files thread — which detailed the bureaucratic structure setup between FBI, DHS and Twitter for mass-forwarding moderation requests of people on both right and left — wasn’t newsworthy? This wasn’t of public interest?
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Is this a joke? Taibbi is doing a new Twitter Files thread while continuing to ignore what Musk has done to journalists on this platform for the past 24 hours? Even Weiss has called him out, but Taibbi seems to want to tweet through it. Wow. twitter.com/mtaibbi/status…
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How can demand I comment on something I haven’t covered, e.g. Modi, when he repeatedly refused to address errors his network affirmatively did make but were exposed by TF reports (e.g. Hamilton 68)? That doesn’t need addressing before accusing others of a cop-out?
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I posted it ten seconds into the interview, once he went the “What happened to you, man?” routine.
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Replying to @mtaibbi
Haha he posted this literally after he got cooked for inaccurate reporting by msnbc 
talk about being butt hurt
talk about being butt hurt148
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Re MSNBC. Now unlocked…
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For to gloat over two minor errors, while dismissing both the substance of censorship story in the #TwitterFiles and the fact that those stories exposed significant uncorrected mistakes by his his own network, is incredible. I stand by my work.
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Part of the job is facing critics and making corrections when appropriate. This is how we arrive at truth in a free press system.
I went on today to defend the #TwitterFiles precisely because MSNBC hasn't engaged in this process across years of Russiagate reports.
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Restoring report that, per the Election Integrity Partnership's own report, their work resulted in flagging of 22 million tweets.
They're playing games with terms like "unique original URL," where more than 1000 tweets can be "collpased" into one "incident":
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Here's an MSNBC host talking about how they always correct errors, over an erroneous chyron - about Russian bots being behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag:
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Weird, no correction or update has been made since "RUSSIAN BOTS BEHIND 'RELEASE THE MEMO'" has been exposed to be a total scam. #Hamilton68
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Since we're in the business of cleaning things up, it should be noted the MSNBC transcript of that interview six years ago still identifies me as my father, Mike Taibbi, and "NBC TELEVISION REPORTER" Matt Taibbi:
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The last time I was on MSNBC before today' with was just before the inauguration of , when I made the mistake of saying, "We don't have any hard evidence" that there was a conspiracy with Russia." I was never invited back:
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Again, Just had a very contentious interview with
, who made me aware of three errors in the #TwitterFiles, which as a responsible journalist - unlike MSNBC, which has not corrected years of huge mistakes - I am now retracting/correcting:
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In #TwitterFiles #19, about Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, I mistakenly said the EIP had been created after the pausing of the Disinformation Governance board. That was incorrect. The new tweet looks like: twitter.com/mtaibbi/status
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In the third case, and Stanford assert that I misinterpreted a passage from an EIP final report about 22 million being flagged. Unlike other Stanford complaints, I can't say this is wrong. I've preemptively removed it.
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In the same thread, I misindentified the Center for Internet Security as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. That has been removed. Here's the screenshot of the error:
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30. It’s crucial to reiterate: EIP was partnered with state entities like CISA and GEC while seeking elimination of millions of tweets.
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In #TwitterFiles #19, about Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, I mistakenly said the EIP had been created after the pausing of the Disinformation Governance board. That was incorrect. The new tweet looks like:
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In early 2020, Stanford created the EIP to "fill the gaps" legally, as director Alex Stamos explains. here: youtube.com/watch?v=QbF2UX
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