Independent journalist Matt Taibbi told Newsmax on Monday that the governmental entities that pushed censorship through Twitter prior to Elon Musk's ownership had to come up with a new category of misinformation to flag things like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tweet about suspicious deaths that were potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines.
"They had to create a new genre of misinformation to cover things like RFK's tweet," Taibbi said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record with Greta Van Susteren." "They call it mal information, which is really, basically, true information that has what they think is an adverse political outcome, that might result in people not getting vaccinated. But there's no wrong fact in there, necessarily, which I think is a particularly dangerous form of censorship."
A new batch of Twitter Files released on Friday reveals that Twitter processed a request to review Kennedy's tweet in 2021 at the request of a law firm acting on behalf of Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
The message included a screenshot of RFK Jr.'s tweet and said, "Hi team can you take a look at this tweet against our covid policy please?"
Taibbi said that traditionally American courts have "always held that the remedy for bad speech is better speech, and we have a very high standard legally for government intervention in speech cases."
"It's incitement to imminent, lawless action, and Robert F. Kennedy is nowhere near that," he said. "What's interesting about his case, with these social media requests, is that he has probably the clearest argument for sort of a layup First Amendment case as anybody that we saw in the Twitter Files because we see these requests that say things like 'request to take action immediately' or to 'get moving on the process for having this removed ASAP,' 'request from Sen. Schatz to have this taken down.' So it's not like they're asking – [it's] more like an order."
The Twitter Files journalist also said that it's not the government's job to decide what the truth is for the American people.
"I would hope you would agree Greta that I think that's our job in the media, to sort that out – what's true and what's not," he said. "It's part of our job, anyway. It's certainly not the government's job, traditionally, in this country, to have a Ministry of Truth to arbitrate what is and is not a fact. We sort of arrive at that collectively, as a population, through discussion and debate, and that's how we do things."
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