Parts of Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files seemed to indicate that he was over-selling what he found in Files documents in order to appeal to the right wing audience both toward which his Substack site Racket News was increasingly oriented and which Musk clearly aimed to appeal to in marketing the Files. Mehidi Hassan brought up some of Taibbi’s errors and exaggerations in his Twitter Files reporting when he brought him on his MSNBC show for an acrimonious debate in April. For example, in one Twitter Files thread, Taibbi claimed that the Department of Homeland Security funded academic non-profit Election Integrity Project (EIP) flagged 22 million posts for removal as “misinformation” during the 2020 election season across all social media platforms. Hassan pointed out that the actual number was 2890–these were flagged for social media companies to examine for possible violations of the companies’ Terms of Service. The 22 million figure was the number of election related posts the EIP studied during the 2020 election season.
In another instance, Hassan pointed out the problem in Taibbi’s
initial Twitter Files thread where he sought to prove the pro-Democrat
bias of pre-Musk Twitter officials by featuring a case of Twitter
removing a handful of tweets at the Biden campaign’s request prior to
the 2020 election. The implication was that the Biden campaign got
Twitter to remove political speech it didn’t like. Taibbi felt no need
to inform his readers that the tweets contained nude images of Hunter
Biden taken from the infamous laptop and thus violated Twitter’s Terms
of Service by being shared without Hunter Biden’s consent. Asked by
Hassan why he did not inform his readers that the tweet URLs contained
in the screenshot he shared in his Twitter Files reporting featured
Hunter Biden “dick pics”, he blustered “because I didn’t need to!”
-- Chris Green, "The Fundamentally Conservative Worldview of Matt Taibbi" (ZNET).
