Technology

Facebook Temporarily Suppresses Journalist Matt Taibbi’s Report On Censorship That Mentions The Company 31 Times

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Social media giant Facebook temporarily suppressed journalist Matt Taibbi’s new report on organizational censorship on Wednesday, causing the post to be obscured from public view.

Taibbi’s report titled, “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know,” mentions Facebook 31 times. In notifications that Taibbi screenshotted and posted on Twitter, Facebook said, “Your post goes against our Community Standards on hate speech,” and then prevented anyone besides Taibbi from being able to view the post.

Facebook also threatened Taibbi saying that if he posts content that violates their standards again, his account could be “restricted or disabled” from the platform.

Facebook allowed Taibbi the opportunity to challenge their decision to censor his report, which he did. In response, Facebook sent a message to Taibbi saying, “Thank you for your feedback. We use it to improve our future decisions.”

“That’s their method of saying that you have some kind of input into the process, which of course you don’t,” Taibbi told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I mean, the reality is that [for] most people this is kind of a Kafkaesque endeavor where you at best have a chance of getting a change made or some kind of reversal if you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody at Facebook. And if you don’t, then you don’t, so that’s kind of a loser.”

Taibbi was one of the journalists involved in posting “The Twitter Files,” which are internal Twitter documents showing alleged misconduct between the social media giant and government agencies, in the days before current CEO Elon Musk purchased the company.

Through his reporting and research on the Twitter files and other material, Taibbi says he learned there is “a fairly limited universe of funding sources that are building up these big fact-checking organizations,” he told the DCNF.

“Some of them come from the U.S. government. Some come from the British government… foundations, but then Facebook is certainly one of the biggest ones.”

“Unfortunately, a bug led this post to be mistakenly deleted for a few minutes,” tweeted Facebook Policy Communications Director Andy Stone around an hour after Taibbi’s tweet. “When the error was discovered, it was automatically restored.”