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Comment by GolfPopper | Hacker News Reader

Um, among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to" is falsifying information in his Twtter Files reporting. Among other things, he deliberately misrepresented mentions of the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) as the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It's clear that was not a mistake, but a choice he made in order to further a specific narrative - one that he only admitted when confronted about it. [1]

1. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-t...

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Two minor and inconsequential errors that he owned up to even before the segment aired.

This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the government contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach.

Per SCOTUS, working through an intermediary is not a loophole around the First Amendment. For purposes of regulating free speech, a government contractor IS the government.

So yes, in hundreds of tweets and articles reporting the Twitter Files, there were a couple errors that Taibbi instantly corrected. That's how you build trust and integrity with readers. It's what MSNBC, CNN, and FOX almost never do.

Those are not minor and inconsequential errors. They are matters of principle.

I watched him before congress. He was not the problem. It was absolutely painful to watch the assault on the first amendment.

Video of his key testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY

Video of the full hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMDjfP1gk60

> "It's clear that was not a mistake"

In what way? He asserts it was a mistake and even your (obviously non-objective) citation doesn't assert that it was anything other than a mistake.

among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to"

when you say "among" do you have other examples? or if this is your only example can you explain why "It's clear that was not a mistake"

Taibbi deliberately edited the text he was quoting in a way that changed its entire meaning in order to support the claim he was making. And after having the "mistake" pointed out, it was weeks later that he "just discovered" his "mistake". The article at Techdirt I linked explains this, along with how Taibbi misrepresenting 22 million tweets one Election Integrity Partnership report tracked for their own work as being the same as the under 3000 tweets they flagged to Twitter, and how he lied about how the Biden campaign was able to report non-consensual Hunter Biden porn to Twitter during the 2020 election campaign.

If it makes you feel better, you can see it as a prominent and controversial journalist on a high-profile story making a number of elementary but significant errors that just happened to support his preferred view, instead of him deliberately misrepresenting facts to push an agenda, but neither interpretation does a anything good for his credibility as a journalist.

What is your proof that he "deliberately" edited the text to change the entire meaning rather than just misstated it? As others pointed out above, this edit/mistake doesn't seem to negate his claim given that the two agencies were working together in this regard.

Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.

Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.

Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.

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