Elon Musk has continually promised that Twitter will achieve radical transparency and become the town square everybody kind of thought it was before he bought it. But first, Musk felt he needed to clean out the closets at the social media mainstay, to show how allegedly un-transparent pre-Musk Twitter had been.
The old Twitter, as Musk saw it, irresponsibly — and, shhh, secretively — took requests from certain government agencies that were trying to quell the shite-storm of misinformation that threatened to drown democracy in America.
So Musk turned to former Rolling Stone muckraker Matt Taibbi for the job, giving him and some others access to the so-called Twitter Files and letting Taibbi craft a Musk-ian tale of intrigue and Orwellian dystopia by selecting nuggets that he could fit into a narrative about shameful governmental power plays.
[Note: The closest analog to this powerful figure handing over content to be manipulated for media consumption is Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy giving the January 6 tapes exclusively to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.]
Taibbi obliged and Musk has promoted Taibbi’s “findings.” But today Taibbi is feeling a Pence-like pinch that smarts when a once generous benefactor betrays you. Twitter has blocked all links to the email platform Substack. That’s where Taibbi’s bread gets buttered through subscription dollars — he has tens of thousands of paid subscribers on the platform.
Twitter, on the other hand, is just a link farm for him. Taibbi says that “sharing links to my articles is a primary reason I come to this platform (Twitter).”
Mystified that such a thing could happen — that Musk & Co. essentially would tell Taibbi, and everyone else, to ditch Substack and write their emails on Twitter instead — Taibbi is saying no, for now.
Since sharing links to my articles is a primary reason I come to this platform, I was alarmed and asked what was going on. I was given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 7, 2023
I’m obviously staying at Substack, and will be moving to Substack Notes next week.
Substack sent an email to all its users today boasting that the company is changing the internet because it is so innovative and powerful, creating one-to-one relationships between audience and content creators, rather than creating a platform dependency like Twitter does.
Substack begins its missive: “This morning, Twitter started blocking links to Substack. But we think the story is about more than any one company. It’s about the future of the internet.”
