Independent journalist Matt Taibbi has warned that he believes the federal government is trying to censor most Big Tech companies, including Facebook and Google.
Taibbi is one of the journalists tasked by Elon Musk to expose social media censorship by detailing his findings in several installments of the “Twitter Files.”
After taking over the company in late October, Musk has given a handful of reporters exclusive access to Twitter’s internal communications files.
The files have revealed a disturbing culture of censorship that has seen American citizens, mostly conservatives, shut down and silenced on Twitter over their political views.
In a direct violation of the First Amendment, the files show that Twitter executives had been colluding with federal government officials to suppress free speech on the platform.
However, Taibbi has warned that his findings show that the government’s censorship efforts are not just limited to Twitter.
Speaking during a new interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Taibbi says the “Twitter Files” reveal that the government was also trying to sway speech on other platforms like Facebook and Google.
“In relative terms, Twitter is a smaller player,” Carlson said to Taibbi.
“You have Facebook and Google that dwarf it in size.
“We’ve got to assume that those two companies are as penetrated as Twitter has been, don’t we?”
Taibbi answered:
“Yes, and there’s evidence for that.
“Certainly, we’ve seen that they have what they called weekly or monthly industry meetings with the DHS and the FBI.
“And those included a number of companies, including Facebook, in some cases, Wikipedia, Pinterest, there were a whole series of companies included in these communications.
“How deep the penetration goes in those other companies, I can’t say, but I do know that they had very close communications.
“And in Twitter’s case, the number of requests that came in was really overwhelming.
“Your previous guest, Michael Shellenberger, talked about how they were paid $3 million by the FBI.
“They were underpaid,” Taibbi said.
“They were doing so much work for the government in terms of reviewing these documents that they should have been compensated a lot more for their work.”
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