On Thursday, journalist Matt Taibbi released unexpected messages on X from Elon Musk, the proprietor of the social media company.
As RedState has reported, Musk gave documents to Taibbi, as well as Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson following his purchase of the platform. From December 2022 through March 2023, Taibbi, Shellenberger, Weiss, Fang, and Zweig published a series of Twitter files that exposed many stories, one of which was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as banning former President Trump from Twitter.
Now, Taibbi claims that Musk is shadowbanning his account. For those who are not familiar with the term, shadowbanning means when a user’s post does not appear in search results. Oftentimes, that results in impression numbers being significantly lower for that particular user. However, it seems strange that Musk is shadowbanning someone whom he seemed to trust.
Per Taibbi, every Twitter Files reporter was a Substack contributor, which allows writers to monetize through subscriptions. Taibbi revealed on X that he asked Musk whether he is being shadowbanned in April of 2023. Musk replied, saying:
We went on lockdown after discovering the Substack had stolen a massive amount of our fatat to repopulate their Twitter rip-off… Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following’.
Since @elonmusk published parts of these conversations, I might as well include others. I was under a “blanket search ban” at one point and a lot of my 1.9 million followers still don’t see my content. https://t.co/vFRtJFierF pic.twitter.com/k29MFxLUTC
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 15, 2024
Here is where things became a bit odd, as it seemed like Taibbi had a good partnership with Musk in exposing people in high places.
Taibbi told Musk he had continuously declined to criticize him and asked if there was a particular reason he was being put in the middle of the beef between Musk and Substack.
Musk responded:
You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.
Taibbi released additional messages. He told Musk that Twitter doesn’t work for him professionally since he can’t share his articles on the social media site.
Musk responded, saying, in essence, to forget about Substack and instead post on Twitter while using the subscription service provided by the site. Musk added that by using the Twitter subscription service, Taibbi would get more subscribers.
Taibbi responded, saying:
If I did that, people would say I’m essentially an employee of Twitter and both of us would never hear the end of it.
Every Twitter Files reporter was a Substack contributor. We all wrote secondary stories about TF material on our sites beginning in December 2022, and that was never an issue. The problem started when he and Substack had a dispute. He felt that people like me and @thackerpd… pic.twitter.com/EYibI54M2D
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 15, 2024
Hopefully, this situation doesn’t escalate any further because Taibbi and Musk seemed to have a good partnership, allowing Taibbi and others to expose those in power.
Taibbi is a sharp journalist, and Musk has elevated Twitter, now X, since purchasing the company through monetization, encouraging citizen journalism.
