Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi spars with Bidens disinfo czar in censorship hearing: We dont need a truth squad

WASHINGTON — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi sparred with former President Joe Biden’s onetime “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz during a Tuesday hearing about government censorship on Capitol Hill, ripping the past administration’s content moderation efforts for having undermined Americans’ free speech.The House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee heard testimony from both about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was set up under former President Barack Obama to counter foreign disinformation and misinformation — but had begun targeting US social media users under Biden.“GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic, English-language accounts — people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China or Russia,” Taibbi said about his extensive review of internal Twitter, now X, records in 2023.“The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech,” he went on.

“The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves.“They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what’s truth,” he concluded.“We don’t need a truth squad — and that’s exactly what GEC was designed for.”The “Twitter Files” unearthed emails disclosing an immense pressure campaign to censor The Post’s bombshell scoop on Hunter Biden’s emails introducing his father to foreign business patrons and the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins, which was later corroborated as the most likely explanation for the pandemic by Joe Biden’s FBI, Energy Department and CIA.Lower federal courts slapped the Biden administration with injunctions for having pressured Facebook and other social media companies into throttling engagement or removing posts on the controversial subjects, b...