The Latest Twitter Files Dump Shows How Mainstream Media Is Failing Us
Free speech is far too important to become a partisan issue.
We are now on Episode #16 of the Twitter Files, and each file dump offers a new glimpse of how the tech company worked hand-in-hand with government officials and agencies to silence and chill free speech.
The latest installment, released on Saturday evening by former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, reveals a particularly egregious way corporate has failed to seriously cover one of the biggest stories on civil liberties in modern history.
While media have steadfastly refused to cover the trove of documents showing government and Twitter colluding to limit speech and free expression, Taibbi demonstrates how media temporarily lifted their informal boycott on covering the Twitter Files—because the violator in this case was the Trump White House.
It was recently revealed that in 2019 the Trump White House made an official request to Twitter asking the company to remove a tweet from Chrissy Teigen that insulted the then-President.
The feud began when Trump called out Teigen’s musician husband John Legend and “his filthy mouthed wife” for not helping push the president’s criminal justice reform legislation, which they praised after it became law. Teigen responded by calling the president a vulgar slang word for a female body part.
Twitter declined to remove the tweet, and the spat was soon forgotten—until the Trump White House’s request was made public.
As Taibbi notes, the press “went bananas” over the story.
Coverage in this case was worthy, apparently, because the request came from the Trump White House. Yet Taibbi points out that thousands of other censorship requests from politicians, State Department officials, FBI agents, and other government actors have resulted in zero media coverage. Zilch.
This will not do. Nobody has the right to control the narrative. Nobody has a monopoly on truth. Certainly not the government.
The fact that agents within the state are actively working to censor Americans by outsourcing this responsibility to Big Tech does not just go against the spirit of the Constitution; in some cases it clearly violates First Amendment protections, as Taibbi notes.
Free speech is far too important to become a partisan issue.
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter,” George Washington once said.
The legacy media treats free speech as a principle worth defending only when it suits them. It's just one more example of how the Fourth Estate is failing us.
Forgive me, I've been out of the loop, but was Twitter declared a public utility, or just a publisher of info? Wasn't that the excuse Facebook used, that they could censor because they were a publisher/private? Definitely one sided against Trump though