Taibbi blasts digital disinfo

Journalist Matt Taibbi eviscerated Twitter and other social and mainstream media outlets during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, saying their collusion with the federal government over “disinformation” had created “a form of digital McCarthyism” in the 21st century.

“Effectively, news media became an arm of a statesponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi, 53, told members of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”

Taibbi — who along with two other reporters was granted access last year to Twitter’s internal communications — said his Twitter Files probe revealed that the social media giant collaborated with the US government “to turn the Internet into an instrument of censorship and social control” as part of an “anti-disinformation” push.

He said the government’s actions pose a “grave threat to people of all political persuasions,” citing the suppression of The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020.

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at,” Taibbi said — a reality, he said, that fellow journalist Michael Shellenberger termed the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”