Taibbi: Government Was Also Trying to Censor on Google, Facebook

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Matt Taibbi, one of the reporters of the Twitter files, stated that the files have demonstrated that the government was also trying to sway speech on other platforms like Facebook and Google.

Host Tucker Carlson asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:40] “In relative terms, Twitter is a smaller player. You have Facebook and Google that dwarf it in size. We’ve got to assume that those two companies are as penetrated as Twitter has been, don’t we?”

Taibbi answered, “Yes, and there’s evidence for that. Certainly, we’ve seen that they have what they called weekly or monthly industry meetings with the DHS and the FBI. And those included a number of companies, including Facebook, in some cases, Wikipedia, Pinterest, there were a whole series of companies included in these communications. How deep the penetration goes in those other companies, I can’t say, but I do know that they had very close communications. And in Twitter’s case, the number of requests that came in was really overwhelming. Your previous guest, Michael Shellenberger, talked about how they were paid $3 million by the FBI. They were underpaid. They were doing so much work for the government in terms of reviewing these documents that they should have been compensated a lot more for their work.”

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