Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi announced he will post his dispatches on competing platforms, including Truth Social, as his public spat with Elon Musk deepens.
Mr. Taibbi said he has grown “nervous” with the prospect of leaving Twitter Files to the “whims” of Mr. Musk after the billionaire owner went scorched earth in his fight against Substack, an online publishing platform popular among independent journalists.
“Whatever was going on between Twitter and Substack had nothing to do with me or with other Substack writers, and if Twitter was going to label our work unsafe and not allow us to share my articles, I couldn’t endorse all this by using the platform,” Mr. Taibbi wrote in a Substack piece announcing his exit from Twitter on Wednesday.
He added, “I know other sites have already copied the TF material, but as of today we’re uploading my threads at least to a number of different platforms, including Facebook, Substack (see the new section atop the face page) and, yes, Truth Social.”
Mr. Musk’s ire reached a tipping point last week after Substack announced its new service called Substack Notes, a post-sharing platform poised to compete directly with Twitter.
Amid the dustup, Mr. Musk temporarily disabled months-old Twitter Files threads, according to Mr. Taibbi.
“The disabling of the Twitter Files threads even temporarily made me nervous right away about leaving them to the whims of the company,” Mr. Taibbi wrote.
Mr. Taibbi was one of several independent journalists given access to Mr. Musk’s vault of internal documents exposing the extent to which the platform, under its previous ownership, pushed to censor disfavored speech.
In December, Mr. Taibbi exposed the extent to which the FBI worked with Twitter executives to moderate content on the platform.
Those efforts included weekly meetings with Twitter executives before the company suppressed the New York Post’s report in 2020 exposing emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.
The steady drip of internal documents also revealed Twitter’s left-wing bent that led to the censorship of conservative viewpoints and the unprecedented banning of President Donald Trump from the platform.
Last month, Mr. Taibbi appeared alongside fellow journalist Michael Shellenberger before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in an explosive hearing that focused on the federal government’s alleged sweeping efforts to silence disfavored views.
Mr. Taibbi appeared alongside fellow journalist Michael Shellenberger before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in an explosive hearing that focused on the federal government’s alleged sweeping efforts to silence disfavored views.
The two witnesses were met with sharp lines of questioning from Democrats, who chided Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Shellenberger as “Elon Musk’s public scribes” and accused them of spreading a “false narrative” of widespread government censorship.
The top Democrat on the committee, Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, accused Republicans of “cherry picking” evidence to attack the Biden administration.
In his Substack post this week announcing his exit from Twitter, Mr. Taibbi stood by his work on the Twitter Files.
“I mean this sincerely: I’ve got nothing against Elon Musk,” Mr. Taibbi wrote. “Thanks to him and the #TwitterFiles, ordinary people know a lot more than they ever could have hoped to about how information is managed in this country.”
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
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