Muskrat Alienates Paid Propagandists by Forbidding Links to Substack, Other Rivals
Matt Taibbi was among those who rage-quit Twitter after Elon Musk, who bought the platform in 2022, announced the decision.
A few months ago, enraged by the exodus of users from Twitter to other platforms such as Mastodon, Elon Muskrat threw one of his patented brand of temper tantrums and forbade links to the rival social media web site, making his dwindling staff label any and all such links as malware and threatening to ban all who dared circumvent the suppression. He quickly backtracked following the predictable backlash.
You’d think after that desperate move to prevent the bleeding of users from the dying Twitter backfired, the boy would have learned his lesson and not tried to repeat such an insipidly stupid maneuver, but Elon Musk is an insipidly stupid child, so now he’s gone and done it again, this time targeting rival platform Substack after it announced a notes system that operates similar to Twitter.
“It appears that Musk is making decisions based on his own financial interests and petty grievances — even if it makes Twitter objectively worse for users,” Judd Legum, author of Popular Information, a politics-focused newsletter with more than 240,000 subscribers, says in an email to The Verge. “If this continues, it’s hard to justify continuing to invest my time creating content on Twitter.”
The ban on Substack promotion, which was enacted between Thursday night and Friday morning, makes things difficult for many Substackers who use Twitter to promote their newsletters. If a new tweet links to any page on “substack.com,” users can’t like, reply to, or retweet it. While some Substack writers have custom domains, which skirts the ban, the policy change impacts the vast majority of newsletters on the platform, including some of its top names.
Now, this has not gone over very well with a lot of users. Interestingly, paid Muskrat propagandist Matt Taibbi, who dutifully and uncritically used selected excerpts from Apartheid baby Muskrat to try and portray the web site as a toxic leftist-coddling woke mind virus pushing cesspool, announced he is quitting Twitter, citing his boss’s attack on free speech.
Matt Taibbi, a journalist who worked on the “Twitter Files” series of articles about old business decisions at Twitter, has said he’ll no longer use the social media platform. Taibbi is apparently frustrated by Twitter’s recent decision to heavily restrict all links and tweets about Substack following that company’s announcement it would be launching Substack Notes, a short form social network and potential competitor to Twitter.
Last month, Briahna Joy Gray destroyed Taibbi’s credulous acceptance of Muskrat’s lies during a contentious YouTube debate in which she challenged him on a number of crucial contextual points, while he tried and failed to come up with answers without looking like the credulous imbecile he’s degenerated into. You can watch that here:
The problem with the Twitter Files, of course, is that what “evidence” it does show of censorship strongly suggests it is the left, not the extreme right, that is more often than not the victim of suppression tactics. Right-wing extremist and anti-trans bigot Bari Weiss, one of Muskrat’s paid propagandists, demonstrated—contrary to her false assertions—that accounts such as Libs of Tik Tok, run by fascist January 6th rioter Chaya Raichik and which incite physical violence against LGBTQ+ folk, leftists, and children’s hospitals, received preferential treatment and were protected from moderation.
To be fair, there is evidence that Twitter cooperated and continues to cooperate with governments and government officials and agencies in order to suppress information deemed embarrassing. Yes, Twitter does appear to have collaborated in suppressing the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and did and continues to crack down on posts deemed insufficiently supportive of Nazi-run Ukraine. But it was never very invested in preventing the spread of dangerous misinformation pertaining to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic, and since Muskrat took over, has stopped altogether, instead allowing and even encouraging denialism and false accusations against China of releasing SARS-CoV-2 from a laboratory in Wuhan in spite of there being no evidence supporting such claims.
Since Muskrat took over Twitter, he has turned it into a playground for fascists who make their money selling lies and inciting violence. Even the far right Brookings Institution acknowledges this. That suits Taibbi just fine, given his self-proclaimed free speech absolutism, which dictates that even Nazis should be allowed to spew their violent filth unencumbered by any consequences even if it means an uptick in violence and suppression of rights against targeted minorities.
But the thing Taibbi and his fellow Muskrat sycophants refuse to acknowledge is that the boy isn’t the defender of free speech he pretends to be. He is instead a petulant little child who never grew up in any meaningful capacity, and whose ego is so fragile he requires a constant flow of praise from fluffers stroking said delicate ego to keep it properly upright. He isn’t interested in defending free speech. He is interested only in being the boy with his finger on the ban button dictating what information people get to consume. At some point he was always going to do something that was bound to alienate even those like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald who now make their living sucking up to him—and that’s exactly what he did.
So now Taibbi is throwing a temper tantrum of his own and leaving Twitter to focus on promoting his flailing Substack newsletter, which struggles to be relevant even as the rest of the world moves on to weightier matters affecting real people. While pseudo-leftists engage in shallow theatrics cozying up to the very reactionary fascist warmongering bigots they claim are so oppressed by the establishment, you know, the ones who’ve been dictating public policy for years (such as who gets to vote), the rest of us are out there trying to fight fascism recognizing it for the threat it is and always has been to all life on Earth. But Taibbi and his fellow suckups don’t care. They probably never did. All they care about is being allowed to spread their own brand of disinformation unhindered by anyone.
How’s that working out for them?
UPDATE:
On Saturday, 8 April 2023 Muskrat angrily denied that Twitter is blocking links to Substack, but as always, it appears he’s lying.
Musk insists Twitter never blocked links to Substack posts, which might be technically true in some sense, but doesn’t tell the whole story. In reality, Twitter has put up numerous roadblocks for anyone trying to visit Substack posts, even displaying a warning that links to Substack may be unsafe.
As you can see below, the warning says Substack may contain malicious links that try to steal your personal information or may even have violent or misleading content.
Also, anyone trying to like or retweet any tweet with a Substack link is unable to do so. Twitter shows a notice that reads, “Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter.”
Again, you can see the warning at the bottom of the image below, which I captured while trying to retweet a post from my Substack blog, Paleofuture.
The boy clearly thinks we are stupid.
UPDATE 2:
Briahna Joy Gray again hits it out of the proverbial park.
This week, Taibbi went on the show of conservative MSDNC host Mehdi Hasan (formerly of The Intercept) to hit back at criticism of his reporting. Hasan is a shameless, often dishonest shill for establishment Democrats, and his criticisms are all too often grounded in disingenuous, vapid rationale. The only thing his failed attempt to discredit Taibbi accomplished was to give Ms. Gray another opportunity to point out that Muskrat’s supposed devotion to free speech principles doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and that Taibbi is himself being disingenuous in denying his own choice to be so credulous and uninterested in questioning the motivations and hypocrisy of his boss.