Online censorship corrupts individual freedom of thought in America, says journalist Matt Taibbi.
The Impact of Censorship on Society
The “consensus enforcement mechanism” of censorship on social media has not only been an attack on civil liberty but has also sapped the public square of a desire to reach the truth, according to journalist Matt Taibbi.
Where there was once a hunger for freedom, there is now a collective apathy over fighting to keep it preserved, Mr. Taibbi said.
“In parallel to this censorship program, I think what they’re doing with things like shadow banning and deny listing is they’re trying to simplify controversies and reduce everybody’s field of view,” Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
In doing so, the will to be curious and think about issues in a complicated way has been exhausted, he said.
“It’s making us less interested in fighting for our rights,” Mr. Taibbi said.
In 2022, Mr. Taibbi uncovered an FBI censorship operation in partnership with former Twitter staff, which became known as the Twitter Files.
In his speech at “Freedom Fest” in Memphis, Tennessee on July 14, Mr. Taibbi said what he found unbelievable was not the government censorship but its endorsement in society at large.
“The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation,” Mr. Taibbi said in the speech. “This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship, they believe it to be vitally necessary.” The American public had formerly been known for its rebellious, fighting spirit, willing to protest government overreach, but what’s taken place over the last several years has homogenized that spirit into compliance, he said. This homogenization has only been facilitated by social media, he said. “I was one of the first people in the ‘mainstream media’ to worry about it [internet censorship] in the States, and one of the first things I was told is that social media is addictive, the same way cigarettes are addictive,” Mr. Taibbi said. “There are studies done about how people get dopamine hits even from feeling, for instance, the waffle pattern on the back of their phones; they’re addicted to the whole process of looking at their phones.” This addiction fuels an internet culture that is intrinsically anti-individualistic, he said, which most prominently shows in younger people whose self-worth becomes ensnared by how much attention they’re getting on social media, leaving them to not rely on self-creation but instead group approval. Mr. Taibbi said this mindset is contrary to the American spirit. “We Americans once cherished independence and lived off folk tales about going off on one’s own, on the open road,” he said in his speech. “Think about Ishmael, or Huck and Jim, or Chuck Berry, who picked up a guitar and sang about setting out with ‘no particular place to go,’ creating a dazzling sound that touched a nerve with the whole world.” But that spirit has departed, Mr. Taibbi said. “We never had to think about how we fit into a crowd as much as we do now,” he told EpochTV. “And I think internet culture wraps up everybody so much in group affirmation that it’s been very harmful.” This herd behavior has contaminated journalism, a field that he said in the past instructed people to go in the opposite direction, ask questions, and think critically. In media today, he said, journalists are discouraged to step out of the narrative. “Now, the stars of our business and mainstream media are all people who go along with the consensus view of things, and it’s very frowned upon to raise questions about things that have ‘been decided,’” he said. This fear has spread into academia and newsrooms, Mr. Taibbi said, creating a chilling effect on the sharing of individual thought. “That’s just a terrible atmosphere for this kind of job because you need to have that spirit of free inquiry in order to get to the truth,” Mr. Taibbi said. Investigative reporting isn’t about garnering popularity by reinforcing a shared consensus, Mr. Taibbi said, though that’s what journalism today has become. “Your average investigative journalist—the good ones—are difficult, prickly people who go against the grain, and they keep digging until they find what they think is the truth,” he said. “Take somebody like Seymour Hersh—that is exactly the kind of person the current system is designed to weed out—the person who doesn’t accept on its face whatever the official explanation of things is.” Hersh reported in February an allegation that the Biden administration had sanctioned a military operation that involved destroying three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, while legacy media outlets issued the consensus that their destruction was “a mystery.” “That’s the attitude of a real journalist,” Mr. Taibbi said. “They don’t want that person anymore and it wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I started to see people expressing that openly in the business. Ever since I’ve been trying to understand why that is. What’s the big change?” Even before the internet, there was a demographic shift in journalism, Mr. Taibbi said. “When my father started doing this job, it was more of a trade than a profession,” Mr. Taibbi said. “It was very common for people who went into journalism to be the sons and daughters of electricians or plumbers or graduates of typing schools.” After the book “All the President’s Men” was published in 1974 about the 1972 Watergate scandal, followed by a 1976 film, journalism became more appealing to the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite, Mr. Taibbi said. “So, this created a problem, especially I noticed on the campaign trail because they were the same people socially as the people they were reporting on,” Mr. Taibbi said. Instead of being adversarial, reporters had entered into a cooperative relationship with the political players, Mr. Taibbi said. As an example, Mr. Taibbi pointed to the 1996 book “Primary Colors,” which was first published anonymously, though it was later found to be written by columnist Joe Klein. Klein mixed fiction and nonfiction to tell the story of former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign trail. “Instead of ‘All the President’s Men,’ this was somebody who got in the inside and told the story from the point of view of the candidate, as opposed to looking at the candidate on behalf of the public,” Mr. Taibbi said. During former President Barack Obama’s administration, and later under former President Donald Trump, journalists galvanized into what Mr. Taibbi called a “consensus enforcement mechanism” resembling the Soviet, “low-rent advertisement” reporting that carried water for the factions of the Communist Party. With no evidence, American journalists took unsupported stories like the allegation that Trump had worked with the Russian government to get elected and attacked anyone who questioned the narrative, Mr. Taibbi said. “I was recognizing the same kinds of language that we saw in the WMD [Iraq weapons of mass destruction] affair, where a lot of people were talking about anonymous sources, referring to things that could not be independently confirmed by other reporters,” Mr. Taibbi said. “Like science, if you can’t repeat the experiment in the lab, you’ve got to be a little bit nervous about it. And I thought this is a really big story to be risking so much on.” In May, special counsel John Durham issued his final report in which he concluded that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and that the FBI had made several “missteps” in the investigation. When he saw journalists like Glenn Greenwald scorned for reporting on the holes in the story that was Russiagate, Mr. Taibbi said he began to become convinced that it was more propaganda than truth. “It only got worse from there,” he said. Though seasoned journalists like Greenwald and himself can face the heat, Mr. Taibbi warned that this treatment dissuades journalists who may now
A phone screen displays a photo of Elon Musk with the Twitter logo shown in the background in Washington on Oct. 4, 2022. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
Journalist Matt Taibbi testifies at the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on “The Twitter Files” in Washington on March 9, 2023, in a still from video. (House Judiciary Committee/Screenshot via NTD)
A Chilling Effect on Individual Thought
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (L) and Bob Woodward speak to members of the media from the steps of Woodward’s house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, on June 1, 2005. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
‘Consensus Enforcement Mechanism’
Journalist Glenn Greenwald during a hearing at the Lower House’s Human Rights Commission in Brasilia, Brazil, on June 25, 2019. (Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images)
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