(USNewsMag.com) – A journalist reporting on the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi, appeared before the Judiciary Committee in the House on March 9 to discuss the censorship network that underpins Twitter’s policies.
A series of exposes by left-leaning writer Taibbi were based on papers supplied by Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter. The select subcommittee of the House called him to appear before their “Weaponization of the Federal Government” hearing regarding his reporting of the “Twitter Files”.
The “Twitter Files” revealed the extent to which the corporation was influenced to censor particular sorts of content by intelligence agencies, non-profits funded by the government, politicians, university research laboratories, and journalists.
According to Taibbi, one of the first hopes for the Internet regarding information was the possibility that it would make the worldwide dissemination of knowledge more democratic. The presence of a free and open internet poses a danger to all non-democratic systems of governance because it would overwhelm any efforts to regulate the flow of information.
What they discovered in the “Twitter Files,” however, was a systematic attempt to change the internet from a tool of free expression and social freedom into one of social control and censorship via the use of learning algorithms by machines and other technologies. Regrettably, it looks like our nation’s government is taking the lead.
According to Taibbi’s testimony, the media have become an instrument of state-sanctioned thought policing. There is no short cut to getting to the truth. He believes in the fact that it is now technologically feasible to create and enforce an online political consensus instantaneously, regardless of the truth.
He spoke highly of the founding principles of the United States and the First Amendment. He said that the last line of defense against what he called the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is the First Amendment and a populace habituated to free speech.
If the complex can overturn our most fundamental constitutional safeguard, then these organizations will have no credible adversary anywhere in the country.
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