Matt Taibbi Taking Twitter Files to Trump’s Truth Social After Musk’s Censorship Makes Him ‘Nervous’

Star Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi is “nervous” about leaving the Twitter Files “to the whims” of Elon Musk after his public breakup with the company and its owner. As a result, he’s uploading the contents of that reporting to competing sites like Donald Trump’s Truth Social, the writer announced in a scathing Substack article Thursday.

Several of the journalists who released data and internal communications from the prior Twitter regime in the effort that became known as the Twitter Files do the bulk of their writing and work on Substack, a smaller tech company that was itself the subject of ire and disdain by the mainstream media for some time over the independence of its prominent writers.

Taibbi and fellow Twitter Files journo Bari Weiss are among the most prominent on Substack and, after first creating the Twitter Files threads on the app itself, both wrote about their findings in subsequent Substack articles.

But last week Musk and Twitter had it in for Substack after the announcement of a directly competing service, Substack Notes, which Musk described as a Twitter “clone.” The announcement was swiftly followed by a host of actions that would have been described by the current Twitter regime as censorship and shadow-banning had they been undertaken by the previous Twitter regime.

Among those actions, Twitter was slapping full-screen interstitial warnings on links to Substack including the content of its individual and independent writers, prompting Taibbi’s obvious exit. And even more obvious lashing out by Musk.

“Whatever was going on between Twitter and Substack had nothing to do with me or with other Substack writers, and if Twitter was going to label our work unsafe and not allow us to share my articles, I couldn’t endorse all this by using the platform,” Taibbi said of his situation in a new article posted Wednesday, referencing his public divorce from the platform.

And he said so to Musk, he reports, to ill result.

“I was still shaking my head and en route to Disneyland with my kids that night when I heard mid-flight that all of my Twitter Files threads had been disabled (all were frozen last Friday evening),” Taibbi writes. “Though Twitter fixed this that same night, I was next subject to what was described to me as a ‘blanket search ban.’ To the outside world this looked like shadowbanning to a degree that was comical even compared to the weirder edge cases we’d seen in the Twitter Files.”

As a result of these actions, and many other factors that Taibbi goes into at length in his article on the “disappointing” apparent turn of Musk’s interest in freeing speech, Taibbi wrote Thursday that he was uncomfortable with the thought of leaving all the Twitter Files work at the mercy of the billionaire’s caprice.

He therefore announced he and his team are uploading the threads, which are the full content of the Twitter Files that he released, to competing platforms.

The disabling of the Twitter Files threads even temporarily made me nervous right away about leaving them to the whims of the company. I know other sites have already copied the TF material, but as of today we’re uploading my threads at least to a number of different platforms, including Facebook, Substack (see the new section atop the face page), and, yes, TruthSocial, among others.

Judging by Musk’s angry response to Taibbi that by staying with Substack he’s siding with “a company that wants to kill Twitter,” the fact that the files are being uploaded to Truth Social, which is expressly committed to being a Twitter competitor and alternative, will of course not go over well.

Taibbi signed off with a pair of summarizing observations.

I mean this sincerely: I’ve got nothing against Elon Musk. Thanks to him and the #TwitterFiles, ordinary people know a lot more than they ever could have hoped to about how information is managed in this country. I’ll personally always feel grateful for what he did. But he’s high as Snoop in a weather balloon if he thinks banning commercial rivals is going to solve Twitter’s problems. The whole thing’s really a shame.

There is much more in the full article at Substack. Taibbi can be found on TruthSocial here, where the process of uploading does not appear to have begun at the time of this post.

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