Matt Taibbi Details How Obama Order Led To 'Censorship Industrial Complex'

2 days ago

Matt Taibbi delivers his opening statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the "Censorship Industrial Complex."

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Transcript

00:00Mr. Taibbi, you have five minutes.

00:02The forum mentioned Twitter files, author, founder of Racket News.

00:06You have five minutes.

00:08Mr. Chairman, Madam Ranking Member, thank you.

00:13My name is Matt Taibbi.

00:14I'm the editor of the independent site Racket,

00:16and I've been covering digital censorship issues since 2018, the fictional ones.

00:21On March 14th, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721,

00:28developing a new integrated global engagement center

00:31to support government-wide counterterrorism communications activities directed abroad.

00:36It directed the Secretary of State to create a new body, the GEC or GEC, to, quote,

00:41counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations,

00:46including ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists abroad.

00:52Seven years later, while working on a story involving internal communications at Twitter,

00:56I found myself reading emails between GEC officials and Twitter executives about subjects ranging

01:02from COVID-19 to the 2020 election to Donald Trump.

01:06Once, Chairman, you were, Mr. Chairman, you were right to point

01:10out that they were once focused abroad, but by this time, GEC officials were largely concerned

01:16with domestic English language accounts, people with no ties to terror groups or relationships

01:21with adversary nations like Iran, China, or Russia.

01:26When I went back this weekend through those documents to find examples of GEC pressuring Twitter

01:31to remove or deamplify Americans accused of misinformation, I found an exchange

01:37that we Twitter Files reporters missed in 2023.

01:40A lawyer at the company asked several other executives if they had any, quote,

01:44appetite for writing GEC a letter to ask them to stop going to the media

01:49with sensationalist claims about epidemics of foreign bots.

01:53One of the company's senior communications executives gave a remarkably candid answer.

01:59From my chair, it would be very helpful, he wrote,

02:02referencing a well-known Washington reporter, he went on.

02:05The pre-briefed Ellen Nakashima article in the Post on Bernie and this coronavirus story,

02:11no heads up, are making me worry a little about how good faith these players will be

02:16through the press into 2020.

02:19So it wasn't just conservatives, it was also Bernie Sanders.

02:23The date on that email was February 24th, 2020.

02:27Three days after the Washington Post ran a devastating feature titled Bernie Sanders briefed

02:32by US officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign.

02:36This was an extremely impactful story that opened the floodgates on a conspiracy theory

02:42that Sanders was the recipient of Russian help.

02:45It claimed bots helping Bernie online were part of, quote, Russia's broader interest

02:49in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty

02:53about the validity of American elections.

02:56In response to this odd sequel of claims about Russian bots aiding Donald Trump,

03:01the company's head of trust and safety, Yul Roth,

03:03gave an unflattering description of Geck's methods.

03:06Quote, they use Brandwatch to monitor a handful of openly Russian accounts, for instance, RT,

03:13and an unspecified number of accounts that they baselessly assert are inauthentic.

03:19This is the exact formula we previously found behind another often used online tool called

03:25Hamilton 68, whose founders were also quoted in the Post piece.

03:30Hamilton 68 mixed a smattering of real Russian accounts with a crowd of mostly American,

03:35mostly anti-establishment accounts to create a dashboard that synthesized falsely the appearance

03:42of Russian social media backing for everything from the Devin Nunes memo to the Parkland shooting.

03:49Although many of the most controversial stories about Geck involved their funding

03:53of commercial media scoring operations that downranked conservative news outlets,

03:58the Geck also pressured Twitter about left-leaning figures like Sanders, anti-war accounts,

04:04libertarians, and independents, as well as conservatives.

04:07They managed this by using a trick that gave domestic propaganda the appearance

04:12of a counterterrorist operation.

04:14Geck sent out reports that would first identify a few social media accounts

04:18with real ties to Russia or China or Iran.

04:21Then it would separately list accounts they called highly connective

04:25to that country's propaganda ecosystem.

04:28These would be American or European citizens with inconvenient views.

04:33For instance, Geck identified the Twitter accounts of former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

04:38and former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicola Zingaretti, who was often compared

04:42to Bernie, as being highly connective to Russia.

04:45All he had to do to get on the list was retweet what they called anti-U.S. propaganda

04:51or Geck's subjective definition of pro-Russian propaganda.

04:54No actual connection was required.

04:56Through this means, the Geck exactly rehabilitated the fellow traveler concept used

05:01by infamous smear artists and witch hunters from history, from Leon Trotsky

05:05to the House Un-American Affairs Committee.

05:07It was a way to accuse someone who hasn't done anything wrong

05:10of guilt by ideological association.

05:14And I'll just wrap up.

05:15I've gone over my time.

05:17But they weren't looking for misinformation and disinformation.

05:20They were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience.

05:25The idea behind Geck in particular was finding a way to propagandize American citizens

05:30and encourage acceptance of official policy the way we've always done to foreign populations.

05:36It's a flagrant violation of First Amendment ideals

05:38and should be eradicated from the government completely.

05:41No one should have this tool, not Democrats, not the Trump administration, nobody.

05:45Gentleman's time has expired.

05:47Yeah. With that, Mr. Weingarten, investigating.

Matt Taibbi Details How Obama Order Led To 'Censorship Industrial Complex'

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