‘He’s Shutting You Down’: Fox News Host Presses Taibbi on Shadowban After He Praises Elon Musk

Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked journalist Matt Taibbi why he is still praising Elon Musk after the Twitter CEO throttled his reach on the platform.

Taibbi was one of the reporters who published “The Twitter Files” in which Musk selectively fed information about how the company operated under previous ownership. Musk, who acquired Twitter last year, slammed the company’s old content moderation policies. Conservatives, who claimed they had been censored on the platform, hailed the billionaire’s takeover of Twitter after he promised to make it a free speech haven.

That pledge has turned out not to be absolute. This month, Twitter restricted access to Substack links after Substack unveiled its Notes social media platform, which many see as a potential rival to Twitter. Taibbi, who writes on Substack where subscribers pay to access his content, announced he would no longer use Twitter, though he seems to have reversed that decision.

In response, Twitter shadowbanned Taibbi’s account, thus limiting the number of users who see his tweets.

Taibbi appeared on Tuesday’s edition of The Story where MacCallum asked him about the kerfuffle. He said that he likes Musk, but when pressed by the host, Taibbi called his shadowbanning “clearly problematic’:

MACCALLUM: Matt, I want to ask you about your open discussion or spat or whatever you want to call it with Elon Musk, because he is restricting you or–from putting your articles on Twitter because you’re also putting them on Substack, who he sees as a competitor. What do you want people to understand about that?

TAIBBI: I think this is a misunderstanding. I mean, I was working at Substack when I–I was a Substack contributor when I started doing The Twitter Files. I feel like I’m caught in the middle of a dispute between two companies.

I like Elon a lot. I think he’s a lot of good qualities and I think he did a tremendous thing for the public in opening up The Twitter Files for the population to see. I hope he continues to do that. You know, if he’s not happy with me, there’s lots of other journalists who can do that job. But it’s unfortunate because I think, you know, this whole situation, people learned a lot of things that they would never have learned without him making that very, very significant decision.

MACCALLUM: But if he’s shutting you down, do you think that he is the proponent of free speech that he purports to be?

TAIBBI: Well, that’s clearly problematic, right? I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I feel saddest about, is that it undermines the argument that we need free speech across the internet when the person who identified initially as the proponent of free speech is blocking somebody because they’re part of a commercial dispute or for some other reason. People see that. I actually think the algorithmic censorship is much more dangerous and much more severe. But these individual instances of sort of cartoon censorships are what people are gonna pay attention to.

Watch above via Fox News.