For Pacifica Radio, January 12th, 2023, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. Alright, Shell, welcome to Show It Is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of antiwar.com, an editor of the new book, "Hodder Than The Sun." Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now. Going back to 2003 at scottworton.org and at youtube.com/scottworton-show. And you can't follow me on Twitter @scottworton-show because I'm banned again. But it wasn't the feds. It was just Tattletale wannabe-stazzy in the peanut gallery out there that got me banned this time, I think. But anyway, introducing our guest today, it's the great Matt Teiby, the author of many of the Twitter files. And he's author, of course, of the great book, "Hate, Inc." And along with the greatness of his journalism comes all of the horrible and terrible character assassinations against him. So I'm very happy to have you back on the show and I really appreciate you making time for me and for my audience here today, Matt. Welcome. Thanks. I actually had to hustle to upload the latest Twitter files right to the second before coming on with you today. So I'm really glad to be on. And I'm talking about the news that you've been banned. I'm going to have to look into that. Yeah, you know, it would be nice if I could say that, like, obviously the feds got me because I'm so great on their war, Waco, or something. But instead, it's just that I'm rude and then tattle tales who don't like me get me in trouble for being rude. I said that Jordan Peterson should, geez, that guy should jump off a bridge for tweeting in support of the Mujahideen e-kulk communist terrorist cult regime changers in Iran. And I didn't say it to him. I just said it about him, but that's like enough to get you in trouble with the Stasi. But anyway, I guess, yeah. I got so much to ask you. It's so little time today, Matt. Can we start? And I know you got a brand new scoop and I see Devin Nunes memo out of the corner of my eye here on your Twitter feed. So I can't wait to talk about all of that. But if you don't mind, I'd like to give you a chance to talk about yourself for just a minute here because people come at you so hard. And I know it's such a cliche. What happened to you and all this kind of thing? But the accusation is that you become a right winger and that's why you are against whatever the consensus on the liberal left is now. So I thought, you know, maybe and especially the KPSK audience, they might really be interested to know, have you moved right on gay marriage, the welfare state, the regulatory state, the warfare state, the state? Are you a conservative now that you're old and have kids? No, absolutely not. And this is a propaganda tactic. I'm a little bit shocked that more people don't see through what this is. I was basically sort of moved out of the club of corporate journalism. Really over one issue, the reporting on the Trump Russia story. I was set to spend the entire four years of the Trump presidency sort of assiduously covering his White House. I was going to be inside the briefing rooms and following everything that happened in Congress. And if you look back, you'll see that I actually did one of those pieces. This is sort of a giant first installment of the Trump presidency. But then I had to stop for ethical reasons because I could not report on the Russia stuff without getting into trouble, both with the magazine and with audiences. Like for instance, there was a huge moment in March of 2020 when Congressman Adam Schiff held hearings and it was revealed there was an FBI investigation and he read all this stuff from the Steele dossier into the record and I sent out a routine journalistic query saying, did you vet any of that stuff? And they essentially said, we look forward to talking to Mr. Steele in the future to either endorse or refute the allegations made. So in other words, he read this stuff into the congressional record before he'd even called the guy. And this was a consistent pattern with this story. If I report that, people are saying I'm helping Trump. If I don't report that, I'm being an unethical journalist. So I had to kind of sit things out and the more this kind of thing started to happen, the more I got squeezed out. And now they're calling me Ray Wing because I'm doing my job basically. And by day, that's even like official was at the New York Times or the Washington Post that called a conservative journalist, Matt Taibee, right? Yeah, the Washington Post called me a conservative journalist and the characterization in the New York Times was even more interesting. I thought they said, and I'm going to find this quote because it's so crazy, they said that my quote, fan base had shifted because I was quote, skeptical of claims of collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump's campaign. Now sitting here in 2023 now, I think we all know that I was right about that and I was right to be skeptical about that. And yet I'm being called a conservative for doing what any responsible journalists would have done in that situation. And this is the, it's a propaganda attack. If you move outside the tent, this is what they hit you with. And really all it is is you're being professional. You're the guy that wrote the book, the insane clown president about Donald Trump saying, Hey, that doesn't make lies about him true. And let's stipulate here that despite what people might have heard, it was all a lie. Russi gate. None of it was true. Not the hacking of the DNC and the WikiLeaks, not the interference in the Facebook and Twitter ads and all of the accusations against sessions and Flynn and Trump Jr. in the tower meeting and the little black book of Paul Manafort, you know, his ledger and every last bit of it was a damn lie. Exactly. And we're seeing just huge chunks of this sort of melting iceberg slough off as the months pass, you know, as we get farther away from this story. And you know, the entire business is in denial about this. I said this a few days ago that the only road back to redemption for the businesses to have like, you know, kind of truth and reconciliation, like we screwed up about this sort of the way they kind of did it about WMD. They didn't do a full one, but they at least admitted there were huge mistakes in that story. And they haven't done that with this. And as a result, you know, the business is seeing catastrophic loss of audience. You're seeing lots of people flock to independent journalists like you and me. And why is that? Because they don't trust these other journalists. They see them as propagandists for either a party or the state. And that's a correct assessment, I think. Yep, absolutely. All right. Well, listen, it's anti war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with the great Matt Ty Eby. Now at Ty Eby.substack.com. And that's his latest is America needs truth and reconciliation on Russia gate and check his Twitter feed. It's M. Ty Eby. And he's got a brand new breaking Twitter thread today. Twitter files number 14, the Russia gate lies. And this really is at the heart of the influence campaign by the federal police on Twitter, right? Is Russia gate. And actually, let me say, I think we all know that the state department was getting in on trying to use Twitter and their color coded revolutions as early as 2009 in Iran, I think, or earlier than that, certainly had a huge influence on all different sides during the Arab Spring. And so they knew that I know the state department was very interested in using it. Maybe it's the FBI getting involved in censoring Americans. That's the huge new advent of the Russia gate era. Is that right, Matt? Yeah, I mean, I think we see repeatedly in these files that the foreign threat is used kind of casually as an excuse to build new pathways between the companies and the security agencies. I do think that somewhere there's a piece of the story that we're not seeing somewhere but inside the government where there's probably some kind of organized, you know, a plan is a strong way to put it. But you know, an idea that we have to take more opportunistic advantage of crises to work our way into the moderation processes of all these social media companies. After 9/11, it was overtly the case that the government went to all of these companies and found basically a limitless number of ways to get information about users from these firms. The new thing is controlling what people say on these platforms. And I have to think that there's a guidance about that somewhere too, but we haven't seen it yet. Yeah. All right. So let's start with really today's story on the Russian bots and the release the memo hashtag. Remind us about what memo ever needed to be released and what was so important about that. So this is just one example of how ridiculous this whole thing got. Devin Nunes, who was the chairman of the House Intel Committee at the beginning of the Trump years, released the classified memo in early 2018, asserting that there had been systematic abuses of the FISA surveillance process and that, among other things, the steel dossier had been used improperly as evidence in warrant applications. And not only did news agencies basically uniformly come out and say that that was not only a lie, but grounds to have him removed from Congress, like move on.org actually started a petition to have him removed for writing this memo. But then there was a second thing that happened, which is that both the press and a number of prominent politicians, including Dianne Feinstein, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Adam Schiff, said that there was a hashtag released a memo that had been boosted by Russian bots and Russian influence operations. And what we find, or what I find in the Twitter files, is this huge series of emails back and forth between Twitter employees, essentially saying there's no Russians involved in this story. We examined it, we're not finding anything, don't do it, they're trying to wave off Blumenthal. If you do this, you're going to look silly. It's one thing like that after another, and it's just the latest episode in which we see that these companies were not seeing what we were told was happening. And how they feel all this pressure, that geez, the politicians really want us to come up with something to say that they're telling the truth about this, right? Yeah, there was a really telling email in which a Twitter executive reports coming back from a meeting with the ranking member of the Senate Intel Committee, Mark Warner. And basically says, Warner is under a lot of pressure to keep this story in the news, and he's pressuring us to quote, "keep producing material." And I think the meaning of that, it's pretty obvious, that Warner was upset that Twitter had not produced a significantly large number of suspicious Russian accounts, and wanted more of them. And it took a while, but they eventually got around to giving him numbers that were more in line with what he wanted. And in order to do that, they had to hire an outside PR firm and an outside law firm that had a lot of connections to the Democratic Party. The whole thing is incredibly shady. But the basic story is Twitter wasn't finding it, and neither was Facebook, by the way. Yeah, I love that, how the first thing they do, they don't even need to be told, right? Well, we better hire a PR firm that's very close to the Democrats and costs a lot of money and just make sure that everybody's getting along before this gets any further down the path of conflict between the two states of state. At the end of the day, they're the ones with the power. Exactly. Although in America, there's supposed to be a First Amendment. Is that part of this discussion at all? Yeah, I think so. I think some of the more significant revelations that we've come across have to do with the structure of the process by which various government agencies are sending these huge lists of moderation, quote-unquote, requests to the companies. And I think there's lots of internal evidence that adds up to these were not really requests. This was mandatory. Just to take one example, they were paid, right, $3.4 million by the FBI in 2020 and the payment was for, quote, processing requests, right? In another example, there's an internal guidance by Twitter where they say publicly, we're only going to remove content at, quote, our sole discretion. Privately, we'll remove any content that's, quote, identified by the US intelligence community as a foreign threat actor conducting cyber operations. So they're basically saying we're going to remove anything the intelligence community tells us to. Interesting. Sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all. Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic Habanero, Honey Habanero, Pineapple Habanero, Poblano, Jalapeno, and the Blood Orange Ghost. They're all so good I swear. And for a limited time, Tennessee Hot Sauce Company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the Sun, thermonuclear hot sauce. It's full of Carolina reapers, scorpion peppers, Dr. Pepper, hydrogen isotopes, and all kinds of things that'll burn your tongue clean off. Seriously, it's really good. Get yourself a hot sauce subscription. Get $40 or more and use promo code SCOTT to get a free bottle of hotter than the Sun hot sauce. That's tnhot sauce code.com. Hey, y'all. Gotta check out these awesome busts of our hero, the great Ron Paul. They're made by the renowned sculptor Rick Casale, the 13 inches tall hand painted bronze resin based on Casale's brilliant original. You may have seen mine in the background on my bookshelf in some recent interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at rickasale.com/RonPaul and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks and this show will get a little kickback too. That's rickasale.com/RonPaul. Casale is C-A-S-A-L-I, rickasale.com/RonPaul. And there's free shipping too. And now I'm trying to think going back when the proper not list came out where everyone who was good on Russia gate was accused of pushing Russian propaganda. It was a demonstrated fact. It was the world socialist website. The Trotskyite sect did a deep investigation of this and they showed where a lot of websites including antiwar.com and truth out and truth dig. And we all got completely crushed in the Google search algorithms and in the Facebook algorithms. And I wonder if you can go back and dig into that and show which all journalists they were targeting based on the lies. Do they ever figure out if that was Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast behind that or what? No, I don't know. I mean that was Project Owl for Google. And obviously Google has a lot more influence on things like search terms and invisibility of general types of actors. They were able to do that without probably specifically using entering any of your names. They just changed the way they measured what was considered authoritative. So for instance, in the case of the world socialist website, the metaphor they gave they told me when I spoke to them about this was in the old days if you looked up baseball you might see your local little league. Now you're going to see MLB.com. So if you're looking up Trotskyite politics instead of seeing the world socialist website which is the world's leading Trotskyite site, you're going to see like a New York Times article about Trotskyism. So that's how they got around it. They tweaked the algorithm so that it heightened certain kinds of things above other things. Now with Twitter, it was much more individualized. They would do that with individual pages and then they would do things like throw what they call bots out into the ether which would in some cases automatically drive down traffic to certain kinds of sites. But honestly, I haven't investigated that side of it as closely as I have other stuff. Well, I mean, there's all kinds of questions here. You're going to have a lot of work to do. I hope you don't stop. Hopefully. Well, listen, so we got to talk about COVID. But also, well, first before that, because this really is a foreign policy show, what about the Palestinians and how much pressure does Twitter get from the Israelis demanding that they want this, that and the other person taken down? And there's some pretty high profile ones from even in the days of Elon Musk where this Palestinian reporter was banned and Rula Jabriel, I think is her name who I forgot if she's a journalist or an activist, was seemingly suspended over some nonsense the other day too. Right. Yeah. I mean, I've written about this in the past and probably knew more about it before I started doing the Twitter files. But the Twitter files, we're using incredibly broad search terms to try to get sort of big themes as opposed to looking at individual names. And for that reason, unless we see it come up, for instance, we're looking for communications between the FBI and Joel Roth, who's the former chief censor of the platform. Unless any of that comes up in that traffic, we're not going to see it. Right. Well, but can you ask, like, where's the traffic between the old Roth and the Israeli foreign ministry? I could, but I have to triage the, like, there's a whole bunch of us and there's a queue for searches and we have to triage what we're asking for. So, like, yeah, you know, I'm still at the stage where I'm asking about, you know, sort of larger things like, what is, what did the White House ask for over a four year period, which might be a huge number of emails that they would ask me, then ask me to, like, reduce somehow. So it's going to take a while before we get down to individual names. But to answer a question that people have a lot, you know, how come we're not seeing names in the left as much as names in the right? One of the answers to that question is it looks like the Democratic Party, the DNC, the representatives of people like Joe Biden were far more aggressive in reaching out to companies like Twitter than, let's just say, the Republicans were, like, they didn't have any hope or belief that they were going to get anything from these companies. So they didn't write to them. So we have all of this traffic from essentially the Biden campaign or people like that requesting this or that be taken down. But we're not seeing the same thing from the other side. And that's, is that an accident of the accidental result of how we're searching? Is it because there are more offenses on the right as opposed to on the left? Like, I don't know, but we're just not seeing that stuff as much. Well, and part of that too, right, was when Trump was the president, the state itself was not under him. They stayed loyal to the ancient regime there, basically. So it's not so much a matter of partisanship or like liberal versus conservative belief systems or anything like that. But it's a matter of FBI and the CIA ganging up on pro-Trump people, right? If he had been a rogue Democrat, it would have been going after Democrats. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, we did find, like for instance, there was one instance where Twitter didn't want to deal with a wing of the state department because they felt it was too close to the Trump administration. And so they tried to avoid giving in and moderating some accounts. But what ends up happening is that they do it for everybody, whether they're on the Republican side or the Democratic side. And you're right that they had a preference for, let's say, the FBI and the DHS during Trump years, because they felt those agencies were not under Trump's control. But ultimately, I think the institutions have much more of an independent presence that's not like I think they're more in the driver's seat than the parties are. Like that's my perception. Well, it's also in just the case that over at Twitter, the employees were far more likely to ban a right-wing rando or someone they perceived as being a right-winger or not on the team versus the others. I mean, it's not just Donald Trump. It's there's a million people who've been kicked off of Twitter for no good reason. I mean, we started off, I was actually somehow defending them when you're taking my side for them kicking me off or cracking a joke. Right. And but I don't want to, I don't like making it about me. But the point is that there's a million people who deserve to have their Twitter account restored still. Yeah. And obviously the company overwhelmingly had a culture that was pro-democratic. And that's kind of to be expected. That's sort of the norm in Silicon Valley. There's no such thing as an open conservative in the email record at Twitter, right? Like those people, they don't pop up anywhere. Occasionally, you do see people pop up and object to doing this or that to a Republican politician. There was some hesitancy, for instance, about blocking or labeling Mike Huckabee because he made a joke about casting votes on behalf of his dead relatives or something like that. But you're absolutely right. That kind of thing was much less likely to be allowed to slide when it was a Republican as opposed to a Democrat. And that comes through in a lot of these instances. Well, it's also the case too that, you know, the people who know they're right usually aren't so desperate to censor everybody else. And what we're talking about here, mostly is people censored for being right. People for being good on Russia, being good on Ukraine, being good on opposing all of the totalitarian COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates and all of these things. And for that matter, sticking up for the Palestinians, I think one of the threads was about Saudi influence trying to clamp down on people who are anti-EM and war activists. Maybe that is why I have not been allowed to gain more than 3000 followers in the last, what eight months, you know? Yeah, they have an extraordinarily array of tools that can pull out to reduce your visibility all the way down to zero and amplify it all the way up to everybody in the world sees you. And on the follower side, that's the little hazier to me because I think that takes place in an area of the company that I don't really understand all that well yet. And that's what they call the operations side, I think. But clearly they can do that. I went through the same thing. I mean, for years, I was stuck on the same number, which made no sense. No, it doesn't. Right. You know, if you have a tweet that gets 30,000 retweets and you don't gain any followers out of that, like there's something odd about that. Yeah. Sorry. It's anti-war radio talking with the great Matt Teiby. He's got a brand new thread out today, M. Teiby on Twitter about one of the aspects of Russia gate. But can you talk a little bit about COVID and the excuse of invoking public health here to censor some of the brightest doctors, most of the most credible people in the field of medicine on the planet? Yeah. One of the first things that we saw that was that gave us a clue that there was something pretty intense that we had to be looking at was we were allowed to look at what they call the PV2 page. I think it's called the Stanford doctor, Jay Butticharya. I guess he was critical in some respects of COVID policy, but in some very mild way, like rational way. He's a big, big old label on his page that says trends blacklist, which just means this person is not allowed to trend. So Alex Barrenson did a brief thread earlier this week on some of that. David Zweig did another one. And look, I think the consistent picture you get with not just with Twitter and not just with Facebook and not even just in America is that governments like to use the excuse of public emergencies to wedge their way into the internal processes of companies like this. Just before the Trump thing happened with Twitter, the EU went to the same companies in the wake of ISIS bombings in Brussels and Paris and basically presented them with a choice. You can either be legislated to the point where you're not going to be profitable in Europe or you can let us be more aggressive in the content moderation front. And that's what happened in America too. You know, I'm sure you remember the old Bill Moyers documentary, buying the war about a rock war too. And Dan Rather is in there and he says, listen, when you work at one of these giant companies, you don't need a memo to remind you that this is a billion dollar corporation with regulatory needs in Washington, DC. And so you can only go so far, period. Absolutely. And you know, we saw that pretty overtly with Twitter, right? Like, we found these emails that were just embarrassing, you know, they're circulating an article from the Washington Post that's criticizing them for not delivering more on the Russian threat front. And the email says, hey, fellas, here's a news story that's going to affect our political advertising. And they say that right in the open, right? So and then there's another email later that says, understanding that we're making changes to our policies in anticipation of future legislation. Here are some changes that we're making. So they know exactly what they're doing. They're altering their stance on things based on what they think is going to keep them profitable. Yep. With the government essentially holding a gun to their head. Absolutely. The margin there, not the customers. All right. Well, with that, we're all out of time, I'm sad to say, but I really do appreciate you making time to come on the show and talk with us about this. It's some of the most important journalism of at least the last year and maybe a lot longer than that. And I know I speak for a lot of people when I say how grateful I am for the work you're doing on this, Matt. No, Scott, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. All right, you guys. That is Matt Taibbi. The book is hate ink on sub stack. He writes at TK news. It's taibbi.substack.com and check out all his great Twitter threads on the Twitter files at mtaibbi. And that's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Find my full radio archive at scotthorton.org. And maybe I'll be un-banned again at some point soon. You could follow me then on Twitter at scotthorton.org. And I'm here every Thursday for 230 to 3 on K.P.F.K. 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week. Bye. (upbeat music) [Music]