April 7, 2023

House Republicans launched an Oversight hearing and investigation based on the Twitter files, which, as MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan noted to Matt Taibbi, a journalist that Elon Musk chose to go through and launch the files, was riddled with errors. Taibbi seemed to want the attention of being on Hasan's show, but I'm sure he is sorry for that now since he was left hemming and hawing while trying to explain his errors.

Via The Daily Beast:

At one point in the heated and lengthy interview, which spanned more than 20 minutes, Hasan brought up some glaring mistakes within Taibbi's reporting on the supposed anti-conservative censorship and government interference that took place within Twitter prior to Musk's purchase of the platform.

Noting that Taibbi repeatedly referenced the Election Integrity Project (EIP) throughout the Twitter Files, Hasan noted how critics have pointed out that much of Taibbi's reporting on the center is just false.

"You said the EIP was founded as a response to the government dropping its proposal for a disinformation governance board," the MSNBC host declared while displaying Taibbi's tweet on the topic. "It wasn't, it was formed two years earlier. You suggest it was government funded, even though during the 2020 election you're covering, it wasn't."

Hasan continued: "You say they labeled 22 million tweets as misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 vote—they didn't. They flagged 3,000 election misinformation tweets for labeling, so you were only 21,997,000 off."

Taibbi admitted to one error but still tried to somehow defend the "22 million tweets" claim.

"You've said a lot of things, um, I stand by my story," Taibbi said, then went on to claim that he had "fixed" the error on CISA. However, the tweet was still live at the time the interview was conducted.

"Why not [fix the error]? Do you not have editors at [your site] The Racket?" Hasan asked.

"I didn't realize that until now," Taibbi replied.

Please do Tucker Carlson next, Mr. Hasan.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon