[EXCLUSIVE] Matt Taibbi: How Hidden Actors Distort Reality, Manipulate the Public, and Enforce Consensus

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “This is the new technology of speech in America: You can dial people all the way up to ‘everybody sees it,’ and you can dial someone else down to ‘it’s almost impossible to see them.’ And that is extremely dangerous, and it’s especially dangerous if it’s done in secret and nobody knows exactly how it operates.”

In this episode, Jan Jekielek sits down with investigative journalist Matt Taibbi. He was one of the key investigators of the Twitter Files, which exposed collusion between social media companies, the nonprofit sector, and the federal government to censor Americans on a mass scale.

“In parallel to this censorship program, I think what they’re doing—with things like shadow banning and denylisting—is they’re trying to simplify controversies and reduce everybody’s intellectual field of view and, in doing so, kind-of drain our will to be curious, to stand up for ourselves, [and] to think about things in a complicated way,” says Mr. Taibbi.

We discuss the current state of journalism, government information operations, internet culture and addiction, and the importance of free speech and free inquiry.

“All of these agencies that were once involved with counterproliferation, counterterrorism, trying to counter messaging to disaffected young Muslim men in foreign countries … they are now turning all those techniques inward on our own populations and trying to get them to believe in a different kind of political consensus,” says Mr. Taibbi.

“Instead of, ‘don’t join al-Qaeda,’ now they’re saying, ‘don’t vote for Donald Trump,’ or ‘don’t join the Canadian trucker protests,’ or ‘don’t join the Yellow Vest movement.’ It’s actually not a left or right thing—it’s just: stay in the safe place, stay with consensus.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Matt Taibbi, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Matt Taibbi:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m very happy to finally have you on the show. It’s been a long time coming. There are so many areas where our interests have intersected. When you gave your speech here at FreedomFest, you were talking about these incredible censorship apparatuses that have been pulled up over the last years, and people losing their ability to kind of communicate their ideas in the public square. There is something more pernicious here, and that’s the loss of freedom. That is true, and I hadn’t thought about it that way.

Mr. Taibbi:
I came around to this way of thinking because I spent a lot of the winter working on these Twitter Files stories. They were complicated in terms of their specifics, who was talking to whom, and how the procedures worked. The basic idea was that the government would like to censor, and that the companies would rather censor than be regulated.

That wasn’t hard to understand. But as a journalist, when there is part of the story that doesn’t compute, there’s always this little inner voice that sounds the alarm. It’s like a doctor who looks at a patient, and everybody else says, “That’s tuberculosis,” but part of you says, “No, I don’t think so. It’s something else.”

I spent a lot of this winter wondering about this. There was something about the story that didn’t fit, and the question was, “Why is everybody okay with this?” There has been this unbelievable sea change, particularly in American culture, but also globally. Americans have always really rebelled against censorship, even the idea of being warned about certain kinds of speech. They didn’t like that, if you go back to the Parents Music Resource Center controversy in the ’80s, which I remember.

In parallel with this censorship program, by doing with things like shadow banning and denylisting, they are trying to simplify controversies and reduce everybody’s intellectual field of view. In doing so, they drain our will to be curious, to stand up for ourselves, and to think about things in a complicated way. It’s making us less interested in fighting for our rights. That’s part of internet culture now, and they’re draining the fighting spirit out of us.

Mr. Jekielek:
Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” I’m wondering how much this whole new way of communicating is affecting that. You’re describing it as an assault on the American spirit.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a very deliberate one, but at the same time, there’s something about this technology that is also playing a role.

Mr. Taibbi:
Absolutely. I’ve been covering internet censorship issues since 2018. I was one of the first people in “mainstream” media to worry about it in the United States. One of the first things I was told is that social media is addictive, in the same way that cigarettes are addictive. There are studies companies have done talking about how people get dopamine hits even from feeling the waffle pattern on the back of their phones. They are addicted to the whole process of looking at their phones.

The problem with internet culture is that it’s very anti-individualistic. If you talk to younger people, kids in school, their whole sense of self-worth is wrapped up in how many likes they’re getting, and how many impressions they’re getting on social media. They can’t measure the worth of their own personalities without group approval, which is very contrary to the American spirit.

We’ve always been people who go off on our own, as I mentioned in the speech yesterday, like Chuck Berry, with no particular place to go. We never had to think about how we fit into the crowd as much as we do now. The internet culture wraps up everybody in group affirmation, and that has been very harmful.

Mr. Jekielek:
As human beings, when we perceive there is a consensus view on any issue, that influences us. Whether or not a consensus view exists, there are also powerful mechanisms that can create the perception of consensus. You said earlier, “they’re” doing something. I want to find out who you think “they” are. Some of “them” have these tools. But some of this is also an emerging property, as you just described.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes. On the one hand, it’s classic herd behavior. It’s the same mechanism as when 50 percent of a herd of deer decide to go in one direction, then they all go that way. Sometimes, people behave in this same way. What I’ve always struggled with is that in journalism we were trained to think in the opposite way. When everybody goes one way, that is often a red flag that something’s up. Maybe you should be looking in the opposite way.

Now, in the media business, it’s frowned upon to cross consensus now. The stars of our business in mainstream media are all people who go along with the consensus view of things. It’s very, very frowned upon to raise questions about things that have been “decided.” I worry about that a lot , and this is true in academia as well.

I’ve seen this in newsrooms. Newsrooms used to be a place where people had all kinds of opinions. People behaved like it was the dressing room of a comedy club. Now, everybody’s nervous. They don’t want to tell you what they are really thinking.

That’s just a terrible atmosphere for this kind of job, because in order to get to the truth you need to have that spirit of free inquiry, which is less important in some other jobs. It’s a very complicated thing.

Mr. Jekielek:
Back when I was deciding to become an evolutionary biologist, so many people believed that evolution by natural selection was the answer to human origins and all the diversity out there. By year three, it was patently obvious to me that simply was untrue. If you even had a basic understanding of the literature, it was almost like a quasi-religious conviction.

I had a great professor, Dolph Schluter. He actually demonstrated some of the possible mechanisms of evolution in these stickleback lakes he had created. He was an incredible mind on this. I would ask him, “Is this strange to you?” He said, “Yes, this is actually very strange to me.” As human beings, we can settle on consensus views on things, even when reality is staring us in the face. How do we deal with this?

Mr. Taibbi:
I don’t know, but I primarily worry about this in my field, because we’re specifically charged with not doing that.

Mr. Jekielek:
100 percent, yes.

Mr. Taibbi:
If you go back and look at the great investigative reporters in history, how many of them are the kind of people who would have been popular in high school, and would have gone along with all the latest trends? Not many, correct? Your average investigative journalists, the good ones, are difficult, prickly people, who go against the grain. They keep digging until they find the truth.

Take somebody like Seymour Hersh. That is exactly the kind of personality the current system is designed to weed out. He is the person who doesn’t accept, on its face, whatever the official explanation of things is. He says, “Okay, you told me that, but now I’m going to look into it myself.”

That’s the attitude of a real journalist. But they don’t want that person anymore. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I started to see people expressing that openly in the business. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand why that is. What’s the big change?

Mr. Jekielek:
About five years ago, at Epoch Times, we realized that we had to have our own journalism school, so that we could get some seasoned, grizzled reporters.

Mr. Taibbi:
Right.

Mr. Jekielek:
Older journalists still know what they are doing, but a lot of the young people are simply not being taught the truth-seeking model of journalism. The truth is out there, and you just need to go out and find it. The question is, “Are you looking? Is that what you actually want to do?” We found that so many of the young people that were coming out of journalism schools, and I won’t mention specific names, are taught something like narrative-reinforcement journalism, if that’s even really journalism. Is there another name for that?

Mr. Taibbi:
Access journalism, and there are some dirtier names for it.

Mr. Jekielek:
We were looking at this thinking, “What is going on here?” These are some people very close to you, colleagues of yours. I am familiar with your career prior to you starting to report on Russiagate. I said, “Hey, this guy is leaving the crowd here.” We were reporting on Russiagate, and anybody who would remotely have a different view than the consensus view, we were saying, “Wow, this is amazing. Who is this guy?”

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, before I get to Russiagate, one thing I would say is there was obviously a huge demographic change in the business. I grew up in journalism, and my father was a reporter. A lot of the people in my family were reporters. In the ’60s and ’70s, when my father started doing this job, it was more of a trade than a profession. It was very common for people who went into journalism to be the sons and daughters of electricians, or plumbers, or graduates of typing schools.

Mr. Jekielek:
It was a blue collar profession, basically.

Mr. Taibbi:
Right.

Mr. Jekielek:
That is very different today, but let’s talk more about this.

Mr. Taibbi:
Walter Winchell had a famous joke about this, where somebody asked him about being in journalism, and he said, “Yes, I’m a journalist, but don’t tell my mother. She still thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” At the time it was not an honorable profession for somebody of a certain class.

Then Watergate came along, and All the President’s Men, and it became this sexy, appealing destination for upper class kids who were in liberal arts schools, like me, especially in the mid-’90s. Most of the people who were high-level political journalists in America, or in the West, were upper middle class, or even more wealthy than that.

This created a problem. I especially noticed it on the campaign trail, because they were the same people, socially, as the people they were reporting on; the aides to the candidates, the donors, and in many cases, the politicians themselves. They all hung out in the same areas, on or off the plane. It was the same group of people, and that is not a good situation. Because what ends up happening is rather than there being this adversarial relationship, it ends up being something else entirely that is much more unseemly.

The great example I always bring up is Primary Colors. Remember that book that came out in the ’90s by Anonymous, who was actually Joe Klein? Unlike All the President’s Men, this was about somebody who got on the inside, and told the story of a campaign from the point of view of the candidate, as opposed to looking at the candidate on behalf of the public. It was a switch in the point of view, and it was a very important one.

Once upon a time, in every newspaper, there used to be a working class columnist, like Jimmy Breslin in New York, or Mike Barnicle in Boston, or Mike Royko. Those people were phased out, and they were replaced by people who were more upper class, but had some cred with that same audience. Those were people like me and Thomas Frank.

We were like the first bridge columnists. We wrote in an accessible style for ordinary people, but we really weren’t. We didn’t come from a family full of construction workers. Then they got rid of us, and now there’s nobody. There’s nobody who talks to ordinary people in big newspapers anymore, and that’s a shame.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m reminded of David Samuels’ piece back in the day about how the narrative around the Iran deal was constructed, and how the White House worked to do that. I remember thinking two things; first, “How the hell did he get this story? This is unbelievable.” The second thing I thought was, “Wow, look at how this guy’s getting attacked.”

Mr. Taibbi:
Was this about the use of FISA to spy on members of Congress?

Mr. Jekielek:
This was the time in the Obama administration when they were very interested in passing this Iran deal, the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. It was Ben Rhodes who organized a campaign to get the journalists to back it and shift public opinion, and this is the story that David Samuels got. It was just incredible. The really stark thing was the resulting attack on him. What you’re describing is that phenomenon. They say, “Hey, you just did something that isn’t part of the crowd and how we do things,” even though it’s exactly the kind of journalism that you would hope one would do.

Mr. Taibbi:
Right. I hate to be one of those, “Back in the day,” types, but it wasn’t that long ago that journalists really didn’t gang up on other journalists unless they screwed up and made a big factual mistake that got everybody in trouble. That’s why there was a lot of negative attention thrown at Judith Miller. A lot of other people deserved it, and it was unfair that she was the only person who was vilified in that instance. Once upon a time, that was really the exception.

Somewhere around the late Obama years, and then definitely once Trump got elected, there became this new phenomenon, where journalists were willing to become the consensus enforcement mechanism, which I hadn’t really seen as aggressively before. There was a bit of it during the Iraq War, but there was always the minority of people who were allowed to give their views. They weren’t hounded out of the business, but then that became a thing. It was very noticeable. The incident you described was an early one, and then it became very overt during Russiagate.

Mr. Jekielek:
Prior to the Trump phenomenon, we were a lot more similar to many media, but we diverged around that time. I remember watching what the mainstream media were doing. I had been covering China human rights for a very long time. What I saw was very characteristic of what I’d seen in the Chinese media, who I don’t really think of as media.

It was stunning. It was one of those moments that when I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Conservatives will say, “The media has always been Left-leaning, and they’ve always had narratives.” I said, “Something has changed here.” There was a profound shift, and then we started feeling the weight of the system, including media companies coming after us in really terrible ways.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, absolutely. I worked in the former Soviet Union in the ’90s. I had a lot of friends who had been journalists under the Soviet system. I even hung out at the Union of Journalists club, which at one point was where all the party members used to eat. I went there because that was the only place to get good food for a while.

During the ’80s and the ’70s, it wasn’t journalism that the Soviets were doing. It was low-rent advertisements for different factions of the Communist Party, and it was totally unreadable. It was useful as a kind of consensus-enforcement mechanism. But if there was somebody who was writing a little out of bounds, they would see that.

There would be warning language in a certain article that would be the shot fired across the bow. That’s something very different from what we traditionally do in the West. I remember thinking to myself, “God, what a miserable job.”

If you want to get into politics, just do it, as opposed to writing this propaganda. It’s a terrible thing. But when we started to see it here in the United States and in the West, I just couldn’t account for it, because nobody’s being forced to do it here, which is the hard part to understand.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, but there are incentive structures.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Just as a fun fact, I didn’t even know who Thomas Sowell was until maybe seven years ago. The big lesson I got from Thomas Sowell was to look at things in terms of incentive structures, not goals. Sometimes those things are in opposition, but it’s actually the incentive structure that will determine what happens. That was a powerful lesson and it changed my thinking considerably.

It seems like there are a lot of upside-down incentive structures. Maybe we can talk about that, but I first want to touch on Russiagate. What made you realize that something was off? People have said that you’re just a pro-Russia guy, and that’s why you went after this. I’m curious about your motivation. How did all this happen?

Mr. Taibbi:
First of all, that’s funny, because I actually am very much a Russophile. I went to Russia because I was a great lover of Russian literature. I wanted to learn to read Gogol, Tolstoy, and some other people in Russian. I love a lot of things about Russian culture, but I was definitely not a fan of Vladimir Putin.

Some of the journalists who were murdered in the early 2000s were colleagues of mine. One of them was a mentor of mine, as a matter of fact. We wrote very critically about Putin, and my newspaper, The Exile, was eventually shut down by the Russian government after I left. We were certainly not fans of Vladimir Putin. That was never even a thought in my head, nor did I have any affinity for Donald Trump either.

The real problem was that I was looking at the way they were reporting the story, and I was recognizing the same kinds of language that we saw in the WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] affair. It was a lot of people talking about anonymous sources, and referring to things that could not be independently confirmed by other reporters. It’s like science—if you can’t reproduce the experiment in the lab, you have to be a little bit nervous about it.

I thought that this was a really big story to be risking so much on. I said very gently in places like MSNBC that we have to be careful of stories like this. We don’t have a whole lot of proof to go on, and that was the last time I was ever on MSNBC, for a while anyway. But there was this instant condemnation from people within the business, and that was totally new to me. I had never experienced that before.

Mr. Jekielek:
That was a complete turnaround of what journalism is supposed to be.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, and even the famous legends in journalism have been turned inside-out. If you think about All the President’s Men, they were all alone on that story for a long time. There’s actually a scene about it in the movie. The Ben Bradley character talks to Woodward and Bernstein, and says, “Nobody else is doing this story. Nobody believes it.” It’s supposed to be a good quality in a journalist, to stick up for a story that you think is true. Everybody else is saying just the opposite, but you believe your story is true.

That’s an important quality in a journalist. You have to have very thick skin to fight through everybody else’s sneering and condemnation, which was much milder back then. Now, it’s just the opposite. They say, “Why are you not going along with everybody else?”

What Glenn Greenwald went through over Russiagate was unbelievable. It was part of what convinced me that there must be something wrong with this story. The New Yorker did this incredible hit piece on him called, “The Bane of Their Resistance,” where it had this scary picture of Glenn. It implied that he had a bad childhood.

He had hang ups from being gay, and he had negative feelings about the rise of minorities within the Democratic Party. These were all the reasons he wasn’t going along with the reporting on Russiagate. They were pathologizing him in this way that was dirty. It was like something you would see from a politician, not from journalists. Once that kind of stuff starts happening, you know something’s up. It only got worse from there.

Mr. Jekielek:
That was the indicator of a very serious problem. Because for so many others, it was a message, “This is what will happen to you.”

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, of course. One of the reasons why this messaging is always strongest when it’s directed at people like Glenn or me is because Glenn and I can handle it. We’ve done well. We have enough financial security and professional security, and we’re going to make it. But people who are just starting out in the business, whose future is a little bit less certain, they’re going to look at this and say, “If I go over there and I start saying these things, that might be the end of my career. I might not come out the other side, and do I need that?”

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re very familiar with Edward Bernays. His view is that we need to benevolently propagandize the populace, so that we can have a good society. Since the time of Bernays, I wonder if this view has been increasing somewhat. As long as things fit into the correct viewpoint, everything would be fine, but then Trump comes along.

The Trump campaign had this amazing social media game. I remember that very distinctly. They managed to use the tools which were previously used by other people. These people said, “There’s no way that this guy could have won fair and square. He must have figured something out here. He must have weaponized our system of manufacturing perceived consensus, and we can never let that happen again.” Hence the reaction.

Mr. Taibbi:
You’re absolutely right. I obviously completely disagree with the idea that there needs to be some sort of educated vanguard that nudges the population in the correct direction. Thomas Jefferson wrote about how we don’t want to have aristocracies in America, but it’s okay if we have a natural aristocracy that builds up from merit, because they’re smarter, they’re harder workers, they’re achievers, and they can be the leaders of our society.

I’m not necessarily opposed to that idea. But in journalism, we were always taught our job ends when we publish the stuff. It’s up to the reader to figure out what to do with the information. We don’t have to give them a push, and say, “Here’s what you should do with it. Here’s who you should vote for. Here’s the conclusions you should draw from that.”

That inevitably corrupts the mission of this job. What happened with Trump was a dual failure. First of all, a lot of the journalists were blind to why he was succeeding. That was amazing to me, because it seemed incredibly obvious. Trump was going into these crowds, and like a comedian, he was feeling out where all the anger was, and he would just throw red meat to all these different factions. People had a right to be angry at that time, because America was becoming dysfunctional.

We had just lived through a crippling financial crisis, where the very rich got completely bailed out, and everybody else didn’t. There was all of this hostility out there. He captured it in a very smart way, maybe through pure feel, but we didn’t report on that. We reported, “He’s a racist demagogue. Everything he says is a lie. Don’t pay any attention to him. There’s no analysis that needs to be done here. All you need to do is listen to us, and we will tell you who is the appropriate person to vote for.”

That only made people angrier, because Americans don’t like to be told what to do. They especially don’t like it when it’s coming from the media class, which has lost a lot of trust in the last 20 years or so. That whole attitude has corrupted not just the media business, but also government and academia. After Trump, there is this fear that the people are a great beast, and we have to do everything we can to subdue it. There’s no longer this trust-based relationship between the intellectual class and everybody else.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is it a vicious cycle? You have these very powerful tools of creating a perceived consensus around an issue. The in-group that holds these tools are also susceptible. We had Trump derangement syndrome. Later, we had Covid derangement syndrome. Now we have Elon derangement syndrome. A lot of people have really believed in all of that.

The hatred against Trump is very visceral and real among some people. Whether or not you like the guy, and whether or not you like his methods, there’s no reason you would hate him unless this was somehow nudged. But then, if you believe it yourself as a journalist, it turns into a vicious cycle.

That’s what happened with the trucker’s movement in Canada. They said, “Those are white supremacists.” Then the media said back to the government, “Oh my god. These are really white supremacists.” Then the government said, “Yes, these are really white supremacists.” Suddenly, this very ragtag, genuinely grassroots movement became some kind of existential threat.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, and once you use a term like “white supremacist,” there’s really no coming back from that. That’s not a survivable epithet in the business. Nobody wants to be dealing with being on the side of white supremacists. It’s almost like the same kind of thinking that Dostoyevsky was describing in Crime and Punishment. Once you think somebody is bad enough, and once you’ve convinced yourself they are so devoid of positive qualities that you don’t need to have normal human sympathy or compassion, then everything is permitted.

That’s what happens with all of these news stories. They demonize and they create these code words that mean, “Don’t take those people seriously. They’re terrorists, they’re fascists, they’re white supremacists, and they’re anti-vax. Therefore, you don’t need to pay attention to them. You don’t need to have any kind of conversation with them. You just need to appropriately disdain them.”

They’re asking people to stop thinking. Tens of millions of people no longer have conversations. Just hate, hate, and hate. Again, that’s something that was predicted by Orwell. Why have the two minute hate session? Because it’s necessary. It’s a reinforcement mechanism in a society where intellectualism is downplayed. It is an important ritual for people to feel that in concert with others—that hatred, disdain, and unthinking rage. That’s what you see on the internet.

Mr. Jekielek:
I said earlier that you and The Epoch Times intersected in several areas like Russiagate and Covid origins. You were one of the earliest to really look at these things. Now we have this whole censorship enterprise to investigate. I just have to mention the Consensus Koala, which amused me greatly. Was this Walter Kirn’s thing?

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, the Consensus Koala was his idea.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the Consensus Koala all about?

Mr. Taibbi:
There was a law called the Smith-Mundt Act, in 1948, and this set the stage for the creation of the CIA, after the OSS. One of the parts of the law was that the government cannot actively propagandize the population, especially the intelligence services. They had to be out of that business. But there were some exceptions for public service messaging with things like Smokey. They were allowed to do that.

What we found is that they have been gradually rolling back those restrictions. Now, instead of Smokey the Bear, we were joking that now we have the Consensus Koala. That means you must think the way everybody else thinks. The FBI, especially the FBI’s counterintelligence division, which is very heavily involved with overseas intelligence, the CIA, and DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Agency], which we would only ever read about in conspiracy theory literature—we ran into them over and over again in the Twitter Files.

All of these agencies that were once involved with counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, and counter-messaging to disaffected young Muslim men in foreign countries, are now turning all of those techniques inward on our own population, and trying to get them to believe in a different kind of political consensus.

Instead of, “Don’t join Al Qaeda,” now they’re saying, “Don’t vote for Donald Trump,” or, “Don’t join the Canadian trucker protests,” or, “Don’t join the Yellow Vest movement.” It’s actually not a Left or Right thing. It’s just, “Stay in the safe place. Stay with consensus.” This is a real thing. This is something that we’re observing. We can see the outlines of it in the Twitter Files, but if we dig deeper, we will find out that there’s much more to it.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is exactly the thought that I had, that there was this more subtle nudging that was being actively done. Up until 2016 everything’s rolling along within the boundaries of reason. Suddenly, these powerful new social media tools are suddenly used to upend that system. What are they going to do? They might take all their most potent information warfare weapons and use them. That’s very scary, but I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if that’s what happened, but I fear that that may be true.

Mr. Taibbi:
We have a lot of data points that suggest that that’s what’s going on. Oddly enough, going back to 2004, my old magazine, Rolling Stone, did a story about the NSA [National Security Agency] doing information operations overseas about WMDs. Because they were prohibited by those old laws from doing it here at home, the methodology would be, “We’ll plant a news story in a foreign newspaper and that will be picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post.” In that manner, a news story that was created by the American intelligence services would come back home. Now, they can do this a little bit more directly. The levers they can use don’t have to be as subtle.

An example that we found in the Twitter Files was about Dr. Jill Stein. She is in the Green Party, and on Twitter she was put on a deny list. An algorithm decided that she had too many views that were in sync with what they called Russian propaganda, so she was put into a group that was called Is_Russian, and she was de-amplified. Now, if you were going to look for Jill Stein’s posts, they would be harder to find.

This is the new technology of speech in America. You can dial people all the way up so that everyone can see them, or you can dial people down so that it’s almost impossible to see them. That is extremely dangerous, and it’s especially dangerous if it’s done in secret. Nobody knows exactly how it operates, and we only have the faintest outlines of it. But overall, I think you’re right. The information operations that we did all around the world have now come home.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m very aware of incredibly sophisticated information operations coming out of Communist China, and the same thing is coming out of Russia. People are being impacted by these things in very negative ways. It makes sense to try to counter those things. It makes sense for the government to counter those types of things. However, it doesn’t make sense for the government to do certain other things, as you pointed out in your Hamilton 68 story.

Mr. Taibbi:
Hamilton 68, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
You can’t use that on the local population. Someone gets to decide what is pernicious and is a real threat to the population. These things actually need to exist in some form. But we’ve seen that it has been turned into something else, or do they even need to exist?

Mr. Taibbi:
First of all, That’s a very difficult question. I agree with you that action is required if the Russians are creating a bot network, and are trying to influence elections. I was surprised during the Twitter Files to learn that this was going on to a degree that was greater than I thought, and the same thing with China and Iran. The problem was best exemplified by a report by an agency called the Global Engagement Center, which is under the State Department. It was very similar to the Hamilton 68 story.

The Global Engagement Center did old-school intelligence work to identify a series of accounts as actually being Russian accounts. In addition, they created another category called the information ecosystem of Russia. These were people who were “innocents,” but whose views coincided with the Russian bot or the Russian account, and so let’s get rid of them too. That’s where it gets dangerous. If you think about a channel like RT, what is RT going to cover?

RT is naturally going to cover all the things that are really wrong with America. They’re going to pick out all the things that we actually want to sweep under the rug. Do they have a nefarious reason for doing it? Yes, probably, but there are people who are going to watch those programs. There are journalists who are going to appear on that channel, like Chris Hedges, who are doing it because they are really worried about those issues. You can’t just wipe all that stuff out, just because the Russians want to highlight it.

That’s where there is disagreement up high on this stuff. It’s always going to be a balancing test for these carriers, because they all know what’s going on. The question is how much are they going to clean it up? At some point, if they clean up too much, then the conversations become too stilted, and it becomes harder for them to make money, and they don’t stay in business.

Then the tool is useless to everybody, because it’s either banned outright, the way some of the American platforms are in Russia now, or it’s just infested with intelligence agents, which is what’s going on in the West. I don’t know exactly what to do. But I do know that you can’t willy-nilly remove people from platforms just because they happen to have views that coincide with some foreign power.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m becoming more of a free speech absolutist. People call it inauthentic to have machine-driven campaigns to create an illusion of consensus, but others think a structure like that would do a lot to help us.

Mr. Taibbi:
I don’t know how you would regulate that. Would you force everybody to make public what you’re amplifying and de-amplifying? That’s one solution that I’ve heard bandied about, but that is difficult. No matter what you decide to do, it’s going to be hard. Because right now, people are getting a completely skewed version of reality when they go online. Things that are actually popular look unpopular. Things that are actually unpopular look popular, and that influences people in very strange ways. They are going in and they’re messing with perception itself.

There was a Bush official who got in trouble for saying, “We’re in the reality-making business,” during the Iraq War. At the time, it seemed ridiculous. Everyone said, “No you’re not. People are still deciding for themselves.” But with this new technology, can they be deciding for themselves? It’s very dangerous, and we have to think about how we’re going to go forward with this technology.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a profound issue of our time.

Mr. Taibbi:
I agree.

Mr. Jekielek:
With the deepfake technology that I’ve already seen, it is taken to a whole new level. If we see someone saying something, I suspect that we would be susceptible to that, even if that person never said it because it had been AI generated.

Mr. Taibbi:
Even if you’re told later that it’s a fake.

Mr. Jekielek:
100 percent.

Mr. Taibbi:
The previous method was really based on trust. It was an organic relationship. Walter Cronkite was considered the most trustworthy person in America from 1962 to1981. He was carefully nurturing something in his choice of words, the way he presented things, the little pauses, and what to emphasize. He was communicating with people. Communication is subtle. It’s human. It’s something that’s very, very hard to describe. You can be good at it or bad at it, but trust is organic and it’s human.

With the internet, you can achieve the same kind of popularity through completely artificial and different means. The whole idea of organic trust goes out the window when they can fake almost anything. If you can fake somebody who looks just like Walter Cronkite saying, “Yeah, screw all of you,” people aren’t going to bounce back from that. I don’t know what to do. The old models aren’t going to work anymore, so we have to come up with new ones.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have our work cut out for us.

Mr. Taibbi:
Yes, absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts, Matt? It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Mr. Taibbi:
No, thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
I can tell you enjoyed this conversation.

Mr. Taibbi:
Thank you for having me. This is the core issue where we’re going to litigate how much freedom people will be allowed to have in the digital age. Are we going to tightly regulate the way people think, or are we going to allow them to be free-thinkers, as we did very briefly in the West? This is an inflection point that may later turn out to be a crucial moment in the intellectual history of people. I hope it comes out the right way, because it’s very scary.

Mr. Jekielek:
Matt Taibbi, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Taibbi:
Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Matt Taibbi and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.