Taibbi: It's a 'Fig Leaf' to Say Gov't Merely Asked Twitter to Censor, It's Not Much of an Ask when It's the FBI

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Matt Taibbi, one of the reporters of the Twitter files, criticized those that are “hiding behind the fig leaf” that the government didn’t demand that Twitter restrict speech by arguing that Twitter didn’t really have much of a voluntary choice when the FBI, NSA, and DHS told them that people were dangerous foreign actors and that the files show that Twitter clearly felt great pressure to do what the government told them to and went along with government demands.

Taibbi stated, [relevant remarks begin around 4:45] “Well, people are hiding behind the fig leaf of, well, they didn’t formally ask, they didn’t demand that you do it. But how much of an ask is it really? How voluntary is it really when the FBI or the NSA or the CIA or the DHS comes to your company and presents you with an Excel spreadsheet of thousands of names and says, we assess that these accounts are linked to the Internet Research Agency and they’re foreign threat actors? I think these companies feel enormous pressure to do the moderation and the initial work that we’ve done proves that they did so.”

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