Matt Taibbi on the U.S. government CENSORSHIP BUSINESS

Matt Taibbi: "I think we can say pretty conclusively after looking at tens of thousands of emails over the course of these weeks, that the government was in the censorship business in a huge way that's I think provable now, and not just one agency, really.Every conceivable wing of the enforcement agencies of the US.Government were in some way or another sending moderation requests to Twitter.And in many cases those requests were being fulfilled and they were coming from everywhere, from every place from the NSA to the HHS to FBI, DHS,and even what they call other government agencies, which I think is code for the CIA.

So we have reports from all over,from states, from police departments, everywhere.So that's prima facial illegal.It's unconstitutional.Government cannot censor political speech.It could not be clearer.Our assumption is that this was made possible because of hysteria about Russian penetration of our politics.Is that your read of it?Absolutely, yeah.I think the thread that I put out yesterday traces the history of what happened, particularly in the fall of 2017.Twitter somewhat naively thought that they would not be sucked into the Russiagate phenomenon.They really thought this was going to be Facebook's problem alone.

But when it started to become politically very difficult for them, and people like the ranking Democrat on the senate intel committee, mark Warner, the senator of Virginia, put pressure on them, there's an email that talked about how he was pressuring them to, quote,keep producing material for them.Ultimately, Twitter ended up caving, and by the end of the year, they had an internal guidance, which I think is very significant, where they said publicly,we will only remove content at our sole discretion.Privately we will remove content, any content, that's identified by the United States intelligence community as a foreign state actor conducting cyber operations.So if the intel community says we should take it down, we're going to take it down."