Democrats revealed their clear disregard for free speech in the second hearing of the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Thursday that featured prominent journalists who published the “Twitter Files.”
Substack reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified in the nearly three-hour hearing and explained how the federal government uses major social media platforms as conduits to regulate speech through censorship. Both voted for President Joe Biden and possess decades of experience covering American politics with liberal backgrounds far from anything that could be considered “ultra MAGA.”
“American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy,” Shellenberger said in his opening statement. “The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the global war on terror with highly sophisticated tools from computer science.”
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DoD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” said Taibbi. “A focus of this fast-growing network, as Mike noted, is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for ‘true but inconvenient.’”
Taibbi called such lists a form of “digital McCarthyism,” with users de-platformed from social media sites and payment processors.
The “Twitter Files” exposed
