Matt Taibbi’s November 30, 2023, testimony before the US House Judiciary Committee on the suppression of truth
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that
came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael,
Bari Weiss and I found was an image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay
Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or
of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s
crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most
read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially
overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was
legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of
the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues
instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and
2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence
in government policies had begun to be considered a form of
disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed
to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee
in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of
“malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one
of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital
censorship programs.
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