Matt Taibbi, a journalist, released on Thursday some unexpected messages from Elon Musk the owner of the social media firm X.
Musk provided documents to Taibbi as well as Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss. He also gave documents to David Zweig and Alex Berenson after he purchased the platform. Taibbi and Shellenberger published a series of Twitter files from December 2022 to March 2023 that revealed many stories. One of them was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop report, as well as the banning of former President Trump on Twitter.
Taibbi now claims that Musk has shadowbanned his account. Shadowbanning is a term that refers to when a post from a user does not show up in the search results. This can lead to a significant drop in impressions for a particular user. It is strange, however, that Musk would shadowban someone he appeared to trust.
According to Taibbi, every Twitter Files journalist was a Substack Contributor, which allows writers to monetize via subscriptions. Taibbi revealed to X that he had asked Musk in April 2023 whether he was being shadowbanned. Musk responded by saying:
After discovering that Substack was stealing a large amount of our money to populate their fake Twitter account, we went into lockdown. Substack tweets will no longer appear in For You, unless they are paid advertisements, like on FB/Insta/etc. They will appear under ‘Following.’
This is when things got a little strange because it appeared that Taibbi and Musk had a great partnership in exposing those in high positions.
Taibbi told Musk that he has refused to criticize Musk in the past and asked why he is being placed at the center of the dispute between Musk and Substack.
Musk replied:
“You’re dead to me. Please stay on Substack and get off of Twitter.”
Taibbi sent out additional messages. He said that Twitter didn’t work professionally for him because he couldn’t share articles on Twitter.
Musk replied by saying that Substack is unnecessary and to post instead on Twitter using the subscription service offered by the site. Musk said that Taibbi’s subscribers would increase if they used the Twitter subscription service.
Taibbi replied, saying:
If I did this, people would think I was a Twitter employee and we would both never get to the end of it.
This situation should not escalate further, because Taibbi, Musk, and others seemed to be in a good working relationship, which allowed Taibbi to expose those in power.
Taibbi, a brilliant journalist, has been elevated by Musk, who purchased Twitter and now X through monetization. This encourages citizen journalism.
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