MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, while interviewing a journalist who Elon Musk chose to see and release the Twitter Files, pointed out three errors that undercuts the whole narrative that Elon Musk was forwarding.
This is not a small thing -- or shouldn't be. Nor should it be just a small note in the news. The Twitter Files were all the rage when they were released. If something comes along discrediting them, this, too, should be covered.
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi's reporting in the Twitter Files claimed the Election Integrity Project was funded as a response to the government dropping its proposal for a disinformation governance board. “It wasn’t," Hasan said, facing Taibbi with the facts. "It was formed two years earlier. You suggest it was government funded, even though during the 2020 election you’re covering, it wasn’t.”
Hasan then confronted Taibbi with other mistakes he had made. “You say they labeled 22 million tweets as misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 vote -- they didn’t. They flagged 3,000 election misinformation tweets for labeling, so you were only 21,997,000 off.”
Finally, Hasan noted that Taibbi claimed “the EIP was partnered with the government Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency -- CISA -- to censor Twitter.” But, Hasan said, Taibbi had mixed up the government agency, CISA, with a nonprofit, private firm, the Center for Internet Security.
That's a pretty substantial mistake.
Faced with them, Taibbi was forced to acknowlege all three of the mistakes.
And, with Taibbi confessing the these glaring errors, a good share of the Twitter Files reporting falls apart.
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