After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files

The refrain to remember with Twitter under Elon Musk: it can always get dumber.

Quick(ish) recap:

On Thursday, Musk's original hand-picked Twitter Files scribe, Matt Taibbi, went on Mehdi Hasan's show (which Taibbi explicitly demanded from Hasan, after Hasan asked about Taibbi's opinions on Musk blocking accounts for Modi in India). The interview did not go well for Taibbi in the same manner that finding an iceberg did not go well for the Titanic.

One segment of the absolutely brutal interview involves Hasan asking Taibbi the very question that Taibbi had said he wanted to come on the show to answer: what was his opinion of Musk blocking Twitter accounts in India, including those of journalists and activists, that were critical of the Modi government? Hasan notes that Taibbi has talked up how he believes Musk is supporting free speech, and asked Taibbi if he'd like to criticize the blocking of journalists.

Taibbi refused to do so, and claimed he doesn't really know about the story, even though it was the very story that Hasan initially tweeted about that resulted in Taibbi saying he'd tell Hasan his opinion on the story if he was invited on the show. It was, well, embarrassing to watch Taibbi squirm as he knew he couldn't say anything critical about Musk. He already saw how the second Twitter Files scribe, Bari Weiss, was ex-communicated from the Church of Musk for criticizing Musk's banning of journalists.

The conversation was embarrassing in real time:

Hasan: What's interesting about Elon Musk is that, we've checked, you've tweeted over thirty times about Musk since he announced he was going to buy Twitter last April, and not a word of criticism about him in any of those thirty plus tweets. Musk is a billionaire who's been found to have violated labor laws multiples times, including in the past few days. He's attacked labor unions, reportedly fired employees on a whim, slammed the idea of a wealth tax. Told his millions of followers to vote Republican last year, and in response to a right-wing coup against Bolivian leftist President Evo Morales tweeted we'll coup whoever we want."

And yet, you've been silent on all that.

How did you go, Matt, from being the scourge of Wall St. The man who called Goldman Sachs the Vampire Squid, to be unwilling to say anything critical at all about this right wing reactionary anti-union billionaire.

Taibbi: Look....[long pause... then a sigh]. So... so... I like Elon Musk. I met him. This is part of the calculation when you do one of these stories. Are they going to give you information that's gonna make you look stupid. Do you think their motives are sincere about doing x or y.... I did. I thought his motives were sincere about the Twitter Files. And I admired them. I thought he did a tremendous public service in opening the files up. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with him about everything.

Hasan: I agree with you. But you never disagree with him. You've gone silent. Some would say that's access journalism.

Taibbi: No! No. I haven't done... I haven't reported anything that limits my ability to talk about Elon Musk...

Hasan: So will you criticize him today? For banning journalists, for working with Modi government to shut down speech, for being anti-union. You can go for it. I'll give you as much time as you'd like. Would you like to criticize Musk now?

Taibbi: No, I don't particularly want to... uh... look, I didn't criticize him really before... uh... and... I think that what the Twitter Files are is a step in the right direction...

Hasan: But it's the same Twitter he's running right now...

Taibbi: I don't have to disagree with him... if you wanna ask... a question in bad faith...

[crosstalk]

Hasan: It's not in bad faith, Matt!

Taibbi: It absolutely is!

Hasan: Hold on, hold on, let me finish my question. You saying that he's good for Twitter and good for speech. I'm saying that he's using Twitter to help one of the most rightwing governments in the world censor speech. I will criticize that. Will you?

Taibbi: I have to look at the story first. I'm not looking at it now!

By Friday, that exchange became even more embarrassing. Because, due to a separate dispute that Elon was having with Substack (more on that in a bit), he decided to arbitrarily bar anyone from retweeting, replying, or even liking any tweet that had a Substack link in it. But Taibbi's vast income stems from having one of the largest paying Substack subscriber bases. So, in rapid succession he announced that he was leaving Twitter, and would rely on Substack, and that this would likely limit his ability to continue working on the Twitter Files. Minutes later, Elon Musk unfollowed Taibbi on Twitter.

Quite a shift in the Musk/Taibbi relationship in 24 hours.

Then came Saturday. First Musk made up some complete bullshit about both Substack and Taibbi, claiming that Taibbi was an employee of Substack, and also that Substack was violating their (rapidly changing to retcon whatever petty angry outburst Musk has) API rules.

Somewhat hilariously, the Community Notes feature - which old Twitter had created, though once Musk changed its name from Birdwatch" to Community Notes," he acted as if it was his greatest invention - is correcting Musk:

Because also either late Friday or early Saturday, Musk had added substack.com to Twitter's list of unsafe" URLs, suggesting that it may contain malicious links that could steal information. Of course, the only one malicious here was Musk.

Also correcting Musk? Substack founder Chris Best:

Then, a little later on Saturday, people realized that searching for Matt Taibbi's account... turned up nothing. Taibbi wrote on Substack that he believed all his Twitter Files had been removed" as first pointed out by William LeGate:

But, if you dug into Taibbi's Twitter account, you could still find them. Mashable's Matt Binder solved the mystery and revealed, somewhat hilariously, that Taibbi's acount appears to have been max deboosted" or, in Twitter's terms, had the highest level of visibility filters applied, meaning you can't find Taibbi in search. Or, in the parlance of today, he shadowbanned Matt Taibbi.

Again, this shouldn't be a surprise, even though the irony is super thick. Early Twitter Files revealed that Twitter had long used visibility filtering to limit the spread of certain accounts. Musk screamed about how this was horrible shadowbanning... but then proceeded to use those tools to suppress speech of people he disliked. And now he's using the tool, at max power, to hide Taibbi and the very files that we were (falsely) told exposed" how old Twitter shadow banned people.

This is way more ironic than the Alanis song.

So, yes, we went from Taibbi praising Elon Musk for supporting free speech and supposedly helping to expose the evil shadowbanning of the old regime, and refusing to criticize Musk on anything, to Taibbi leaving Twitter, and Musk not just unfollowing him but shadowbanning him and all his Twitter Files.

In about 48 hours.

Absolutely incredible.

Just a stunning show of leopard face eating.

Not much happened then on Sunday, though Twitter first added a redirect on any searches for substack" to newsletters" (what?) and then quietly stopped throttling links to Substack, though no explanation was given. And as far as I can tell, Taibbi's account is still max deboosted."

Anyway, again, to be clear: Elon Musk is perfectly within his rights to be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants to be with his own site. But can people please stop pretending his actions have literally anything to do with free speech"?