Taibbi: “New Wing” of Government “Propaganda” Discovered

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 12, 2023) — On his new “Racket” Substack Saturday afternoon, independent journalist Matt Taibbi reported that his exploration of the “Twitter Files,” revealing government coordination with the platform in censoring certain accounts and information, has yielded evidence of “’offensive’ information operations, a type of aggressive official messaging that all governments practice but is supposed to be restricted by law in the United States.”

Beginning on December 2, Taibbi and several other independent journalists began releasing successive editions of the “Twitter Files” consisting of internal communications to which they were provided access by Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, who after purchasing the company in October declared it a “crime scene.”

In his releases, Taibbi has published communications among former Twitter executives as well as between those individuals and government agents demonstrating that the FBI, DHS, CIA and other agencies were exerting pressure on the platform to silence a considerable amount of content they deemed to be “misinformation,” particularly in the months prior to the upcoming 2020 election.

Certain members of Congress also asked Twitter personnel to broadly censor content, Taibbi reported, while making false claims themselves regarding “Russian influence operations.”

For his efforts, Taibbi has been vilified by the mainstream press, private individuals and Substackers, and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA36), who has accused him of “lying.”

In his post Saturday, Taibbi announced several temporary compensated positions he is offering to fully develop the new information he discovered which he described as the U.S. government’s “relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity.”

“State-sponsored research entities,” Taibbi wrote, issue “messaging” purporting to identify “disinformation” to the American public, an activity, Taibbi said “has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation.”

“Disinformation ‘labs’ cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources,” Taibbi expounded, “but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.”

The “corporate press,” he wrote, join in unison to object to the “threats to democracy” allegedly posed by the purveyors of “disinformation.” “I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time,” Taibbi said. “The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed.”

More information will be released, he added, regarding the “Hamilton 68” project about which he reported on January 27 which, during the Trump presidency and as a single source, supplied the media with allegations that hundreds of Twitter accounts were affiliated with the Russian government despite Twitter executives’ analyses demonstrating no evidence of the claims.

“Hamilton 68” was “headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD),” Taibbi reported.