Another installment of the Twitter Files was published last night by Matt Taibbi. Elon Musk and the band of journalists that are combing through these files have taken a page out of the Andrew Breitbart playbook: never release all your information at once. Now that Jim Baker isn’t “reviewing” the data, it seems that the group of Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger – along with others – is setting out to tell Twitter’s tales in serialized fashion and ruin the weekends of the mainstream media.

What Taibbi published was nothing short of explosive.

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

In a very long thread, Taibbi systematically revealed – with documentation – how Twitter went about first reducing Trump’s reach on their platform, even before the 2020 election, was routinely consulting with government agencies, and then finally banned the former president’s Twitter account after January 6, 2021. January 6th may have been the tipping point, but it is clear from the internal communication that the top Twitter executives saw themselves as the gods of speech – and they were looking for any and all excuses to remove a sitting president off the platform. Remember, this is the SAME COMPANY that allows the ayatollah of Iran to have a Twitter account, but Donald Trump was just too much for them.

7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways. pic.twitter.com/Trgvq5jmhS

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

And Twitter was talking routinely with government agencies like the FBI and DHS. Dare we say “colluding”? Who knows, because there’s no exact record of what happened in these meetings. But hello again to Yoel Roth, who truly saw himself as some kind of emperor of speech rules, meeting up with the FBI to discuss Donald Trump.

11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners. pic.twitter.com/kgC4eGykcO

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

We have already seen how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story internally. Now we are getting a look at the externals, and oh boy.

21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone:
“We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life). pic.twitter.com/sTaWglhaJt

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

The FBI. The Department of Homeland Security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Swamp is full of rot, and the Deep State had willing partners at Twitter who were downright eager to suppress the speech of the people they didn’t like. Notably, Taibbi points out that during this period of time before the election, the journalists didn’t find any moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the White House, or other Republicans. But meanwhile, the Twitter dictators were certainly confabbing with government actors to reduce the spread of any “misinformation” regarding voting.

The scope of what Taibbi covers in this thread is so huge that it really has to be read in its entirety, and then read again. The justification that Roth and others used to ban Donald Trump in January 2021 had been building for months at that point. These people truly believed that they had all the power to control freedom of speech on their platform, and were ACTIVELY DISCUSSING this stuff with EMPLOYEES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Let’s say this louder for the people in the back. TWITTER WAS TALKING TO AGENCIES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ON HOW TO RESTRICT SPEECH DURING AN ELECTION SEASON.

At what point are any of these people held accountable? Some were fired, but Yoel Roth managed to hang around for a little while longer before quitting himself. Did he manage to burn some of his paper trail before leaving? What did Jim Baker get into before he was fired? And the truly scary part is that NONE of this would be coming to light without Elon Musk. By the time that Trump’s Twitter account is banned, Taibbi says that the Twitter executives had basically become Judge Dredd and proclaimed themselves the law. They had tried to create a system of rules that would regulate all speech on Twitter, and then gave up and became dictators when it proved to be impossible.

57. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022

And remember, they weren’t JUST dictators – they were dictators who were actively meeting with agencies of the federal government. What was the FBI or DHS telling Yoel Roth in those meetings? WHO were the FBI or DHS employees meeting with Twitter executives? Everything about this just stinks to high heaven – exactly like a swamp. Taibbi has the receipts of the Twitter Slack channels saying that the FBI wants certain tweets flagged or deleted because they didn’t like the content. How often did the FBI flag tweets? Why do I have the feeling that we are only scratching the surface of just how deep the rot went?

The rest of this weekend’s saga will apparently go into greater detail about the banning of Trump’s Twitter account and the aftermath. Get your popcorn ready.

Featured image via geralt on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license