Democracy in the Age of Populism

Are the online speech wars over? Just asking questions. 

Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on Just Asking Questions today to help analyze Vice President J.D. Vance's blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance called on Europe's leaders to stop suppressing speech, banning populist political parties, and annulling elections. Taibbi predicts Vance's speech will be "remembered as a moment of grave importance," as it signals the "collapse of the post–World War II order." They also discuss a nonconfrontational 60 Minutes segment about German speech laws, Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation as director of national intelligence, the crumbling legitimacy of legacy media, and why Taibbi is glad Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election.  

You can find Taibbi's work these days at racket.news and on the America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn.

Sources Referenced:

• "Vice President J.D. Vance Delivers Remarks at the Munich Security Conference" (Full speech)
• Full 60 Minutes video on Germany's censorship
• "Bipartisan Coalition Finally Tells Europe, and the FBI, to Shove It," by Matt Taibbi
• Sen. Wyden questions Gabbard in confirmation hearing
• Original Romanian government document about the country's nullified election
• United States Department of State: Statement on Romania's Presidential Elections
• "British Man Convicted of Criminal Charges for Praying Silently Near Abortion Clinic," by Emma Camp
• "Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech," by Jim Tankersley
• The Guardian: 'Vicious cycle': how far-right parties across Europe are cannibalising the centre right
• The Ron Wyden–Andy Biggs Letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on backdoor encryption
• Just Asking Questions with Lee Fang
• Just Asking Questions with Mike Pesca
• Matt Taibbi adds more source links to this episode

Chapters:

00:00 Coming up…
00:25 Introducing Matt Taibbi
00:54 Analyzing J.D. Vance's Munich speech
24:17 The history of free speech in Europe
32:09 Back to Vance: the end of the post–World War II American and European alliance?
35:58 Fear of populism fuels censorship
45:13 Is U.S. intelligence using the European Union to route around the First Amendment?
50:32 Tulsi Gabbard as the new director of national intelligence
53:53 Who did Matt Taibbi vote for?
58:05 Reacting to 60 Minutes' praise of German censors
01:16:40 Will the Democrats do any real post-election reflection? (No)
01:19:48 What is a question that you think more people should be asking?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript. All quotes should be checked against the audio for accuracy.

Zach Weissmueller: Who's winning the online speech wars? Just asking questions. Matt Taibbi is here with us today. I'm sure most of you know him, either from his years of award-winning journalism at outlets like Rolling Stone or for his role publishing the Twitter Files. You can find his work these days at Racket News and on the America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn. Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

Matt Taibbi: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Liz Wolfe: J.D. Vance delivered quite a speech this week at the Munich Security Conference. John, would you roll a clip from that?

J.D. Vance: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China. It's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too. These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.

And I say "ourselves" because I fundamentally believe that we are all on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Liz Wolfe: So you posted this speech in its entirety at Racket News, and you said that it would be remembered as a moment of grave importance. Why is this speech so significant to you?

Matt Taibbi: Well, for a variety of reasons. But number one, I think Vance was essentially withdrawing, asking, or announcing that the United States was going to be withdrawing from a security framework with Europe. It was really not just directed at the Europeans but also at the intelligence services here in the United States. This is the subject that I've unfortunately been researching for the last three years—this gigantic web of digital censorship rules, speech enforcement, content moderation, mechanisms for surveillance, and overturning democratic results. There has been this growing bureaucracy, and we were watching with alarm, seeing that the United States was just a few steps away from being folded into these agreements.

Vance coming to Europe and basically saying, "We're not going to be part of this anymore," is the beginning of the end of the post-World War II political consensus, where the United States and Europe have been essentially joined together in this imperial project. I think it's very significant. And it's also a big deal for Americans because the First Amendment did not have any defenders under the previous administration or in any of the previous administrations.

Zach Weissmueller: In that first clip we just rolled, he mentions the Romanian election results. He describes how a candidate who was labeled as far-right surged at the last minute to win the first round, and then, right before the next round of voting, they annulled the election. The former president, who has now resigned because he was facing impeachment, released documents declassifying the rationale for annulling the election. I ran them through Google Translate, but we've got links to the original source in our description for people to look at.

Matt Taibbi: Is your Romanian good or bad?

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, my Romanian is not up to par. But Mr. Google helped. What I've highlighted here is that the intelligence service argues that the candidate's rise in the opinion polls was determined by a coordinated campaign to increase popularity, which ensured his victory in the first round with 22.94% of the vote. They identified a TikTok network initially made up of 25,000 accounts. The activity of these accounts was organized outside of TikTok on Telegram, and there was one Telegram account issuing instructions. This account was apparently linked to the Russian government, though notably, the candidate himself was not directly linked.

This is the classic "Russia election interference" scenario. What do you think about that pretense for annulling the results and the U.S. government's reaction? I'll pull up one more document here—sorry for the long wind-up. The State Department under Biden said at the time that it stood with the Romanian people as they faced an unprecedented situation. This statement came out after the court ruling annulling the election, saying: "Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people and are free of foreign malign influence. The United States reaffirms our confidence in Romania's democratic institutions and processes."

Liz Wolfe: And this is from December. It's worth noting that the first round was in November, and the election was annulled in December. That was all during the Biden administration.

Zach Weissmueller: This statement came out on the day of the court decision upholding the annulment. This is what Vance was denouncing, saying we're no longer going to stand by and cheer as countries annul their elections. So what is your read of this situation, Matt?

Matt Taibbi: Well, first of all, I'm highly suspicious of the idea that the election results were significantly affected by outside interference. I've spent a ton of time on different incidents in the United States where people tried to assert essentially the same thing. You might remember a Senate report from December 12, 2018, when the Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned a study on the influence of Russian bots on the 2016 election. There was a cascade of headlines about how 137 million people, or whatever, had seen a Russian ad or whatever it was. 

Now, the people who did that study were a company called New Knowledge, run by CEO Jonathan Morgan, a figure who appeared frequently in the Twitter Files. A few days after that story broke, it came out that the same Jonathan Morgan had been involved in a scheme to spoof the appearance of Russian bots in the Alabama Senate election. This may sound conspiratorial, but it's all reporting from sources like The Washington Post.*

Essentially, New Knowledge created fake Russian accounts, had them follow Republican candidate Roy Moore, and then leaked to news organizations that Russians were following him. We know this because it was made public and because, in the Twitter Files, we saw communications where news organizations were reaching out to Twitter about these "Russian" bots. This is an incredibly easy thing to spoof.

Also, all platforms have robust mechanisms for identifying and controlling the spread of automated disinformation. Even if they don't delete accounts, they can dial down foreign misinformation. So I'm very suspicious of this claim. And just think about it yourself—how many people do you know who would change their vote based on some internet ad? We all saw the images that were supposedly so influential…

Zach Weissmueller: Buff Bernie Sanders Facebook images.

Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly. If that's the point—that your democracy depends on not seeing that—then you've got problems already.

Liz Wolfe: I want to push back on this briefly. One thing I'm curious about is, from a very basic level, wouldn't Russia have more of an incentive to engage in this type of interference in Romania in particular? Because Romania and Ukraine share a border, Romania has been involved in Ukrainian refugee efforts, and the idea of having someone more sympathetic to Russia in power would be strategically important. Romania is a critical player, much like Moldova. How does that factor into your assessment, if at all?

Matt Taibbi: Of course, they have an interest in the Romanian election results—so do we. We spend a gazillion dollars on propaganda mechanisms. Most of them are overt, but Russia also spends money. As you mentioned, Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, so there is a longstanding tradition of Russia having cultural ties to the people of Romania and Moldova. They obviously want to influence the situation, and I'm sure they're doing it through both legal and illegal means—but so are we.

Ultimately, democratic systems depend on the idea that adults can sift through information and make decisions on their own. We all see a ton of propaganda heading into every election. Washington, D.C., is the modern Rome—everyone wants to influence us. We're constantly bombarded with messages, not just from Russia and China, but from every conceivable country that wants to shape our policy. That's part of our decision-making process. The whole idea of democracy is that we trust people to make those decisions.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I think all of us on this show agree that the so-called Russian interference in the 2016 election was really a drop in the bucket. But let's take Romania seriously for a minute. Let's say we take this intelligence report at face value—there really were 25,000 TikTok accounts spreading propaganda in Romania, boosting this one candidate. What should a country like Romania do? What do you think they should do if a bigger country like Russia is polluting their online discourse with memes and bad takes?

Matt Taibbi: Well, I mean, traditionally, what you're supposed to do is use the bully pulpit and tell people what the ban is. If it's really identifiably a Russian bot, usually the platforms will go ahead and zap those accounts. TikTok is obviously out of pocket, which is why it's so controversial. But again, I'm skeptical. This becomes the precedent for why we can't have foreign-owned platforms in any of these countries. How weak do we think voters are that they can't withstand 15,000 TikTok accounts?

The other thing is, they were already thinking about disqualifying this candidate in the next round, which makes me very suspicious of the whole process. Where they absolutely should draw the line is if there's actual interference. Remember, the definition of electoral interference is changing votes, not ads. If there were a digital effort to mess with vote counts, then absolutely—you have to redo the election. But propaganda? That's just a fact of life.

I think it's appropriate to educate people about what they might see online, but you can't have EU officials from Britain and France giving interviews saying, "We did that in Romania, and we'll do it in Germany too if we don't like the result." Think about how that sounds. That's a very hard line to take. I don't think you can use digital advertising as a reason to cancel an election—that's extreme.

Liz Wolfe: I increasingly fear that the years from 2015 to 2020 royally screwed up our politics, or at least our conception of speech rights. Specifically, the idea that words are violence caught on, and that has completely polluted how people think about speech.

I've also been thinking about this idea of "interference" being used in an imprecise way. What is violence, truly? Because words do not qualify. Electoral interference is a very serious allegation. But when we start extrapolating that term to something that doesn't historically qualify, it distorts the debate. It's a strange quirk of our politics. Where do you think this started? Am I correct in tracing this to 2015–2016, or was there a precursor I'm missing?

Matt Taibbi: No, I think that's right. This became a big issue in the U.S. in 2016 with the election. You mentioned the confusion over the word "interference"—that's a really interesting and rarely remarked-upon feature of the Russiagate phenomenon.

If you look at the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which claimed Russia influenced the election to denigrate Hillary Clinton and help Trump, they never used the word "interference." They used "influence operation." That's because, in intelligence circles, "interference" has a specific meaning—it means changing votes. Journalists were the ones who started calling it "interference."

This pattern repeated itself. The 51 former intelligence officials who commented on the Hunter Biden laptop story said it had "all the earmarks of a classic Russian information operation." But Politico's headline said "disinfo." They never said "disinformation" because they couldn't—it wasn't disinformation. But the press did.

The other issue is the concept of violence or harm. Americans are increasingly in favor of outlawing misinformation and leaning toward a harm standard for speech. We see that on campuses everywhere. I think that has a lot to do with European laws. The UK has a law going back to 1986 that outlaws speech causing "harm or distress." Then there's the EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Digital Services Act, and the UK's Online Safety Act—all defining speech in terms of harm, not truth.

The dividing line becomes how a person receives speech rather than whether it's untrue. That's completely anathema to the American system, which is based on damage and truth. In the Twitter Files, we saw people discussing how to make these new rules. The Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder was pushing us toward this harm standard, which I think is dangerous. But I'm curious to know what you think.

Liz Wolfe: I think we should roll the Vance clip about European speech regulations. Jon, could you roll that?

J.D. Vance: I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they judge to be "hateful content." Or to this very country, where police have raided citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of "combating misogyny on the internet—a day of action."

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to protect free expression do not grant "a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief."

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends in the United Kingdom, where the retreat from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs.

Liz Wolfe: The UK case he's referencing is something Reason has covered extensively. Our colleague Emma Kemp has reported on it most recently. Essentially, a man was convicted of criminal charges for praying silently near an abortion clinic.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, the UK has created "buffer zones" around abortion clinics. To Matt's earlier point, they're using a vague harm standard. The rationale is that any speech making people uncomfortable about entering an abortion clinic creates psychological harm. This extends to people's homes—if your house is within a buffer zone, you can't put up any signage.

Vance got fact-checked because he said it applied inside people's homes.

Matt Taibbi: Right, technically, that's not true.

Zach Weissmueller: But the larger point is that they're regulating what you can put on your own property if it makes someone uncomfortable. That speaks to the expansive definition of harm the UK has embraced.

Liz Wolfe: New Scottish hate crime laws went into effect last spring. J.K. Rowling, a noted critic of gender ideology, has been taunting authorities—essentially daring them to make an example of her. Why is the UK backsliding on speech, and should this serve as a warning to us all?

Matt Taibbi: Well, I don't know that they are backsliding on speech, actually, because the United States has a very different tradition on this topic than Europe does. If you go back to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it states, "We have freedom of expression unless it contradicts…"—I forget the exact phrasing, but essentially, unless it contradicts the values of the Constitution.

Liz Wolfe: That's an insane thing to say because once you begin to caveat free expression like that, it doesn't exist at all. It doesn't apply to controversial things, which is exactly what free speech protections are meant for, right?

Matt Taibbi: But that has never been the European tradition of understanding free speech.

Liz Wolfe: Okay, but with the Scottish Enlightenment and the UK as the home of the Enlightenment, do we not see the UK as separate from the speech regimes of France or Germany?

Matt Taibbi: Yes, but they were pioneers in new speech laws. The Public Order Act of 1986 gave police the ability to arrest people for speech offenses. They didn't enforce it much until recently, but it was on the books. More importantly, after World War II and the process of de-Nazification, the concept of outlawing hate speech became universally accepted in most European countries.

The United States never adopted that concept because we don't see speech rights as granted by the government. The Constitution explicitly states that the state has no role in deciding these questions. Our rights are inherent—they don't come from the Constitution or from law. Europeans have always understood speech rights differently.

There's been a significant shift in progressive politics. I remember Ira Glasser, the famed ACLU lawyer in the '90s, talking about campus hate speech codes. He told black students: "You may think you want this, but eventually, someone will decide what qualifies as hate speech—and that someone won't be you." That's the classic liberal argument: The issue isn't the speech itself; it's the mechanism for enforcement. Americans fear that mechanism, while Europeans have a different view of government authority.

The EU persuaded American platforms to sign on to the Code of Practice on Disinformation and Hate Speech after the terrorist attacks of 2015–2016—Brussels, Nice, Paris. They told platforms, "You're accomplices to hate crimes unless you clamp down." Platforms became signatories to these codes, which eventually became law. That code was just folded into the Digital Services Act yesterday.

Liz Wolfe: That's interesting. You're saying some of the legal framework was established in 1986, but the enforcement ramped up recently. Has this been a slow roll, preventing major backlash? And how do you explain the UK's particularly intense gender-critical movement? You'd think they would have a robust understanding of speech rights. Has this been a 40-year crawl toward illiberalism?

Matt Taibbi: I don't know the answer. It's still a mystery. When I started working on the Twitter Files with Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Lee Fang, our first job was figuring out what we were looking at. After a month, we realized the FBI was communicating directly with platforms. Then we learned just how vast that bureaucracy was.

But the bigger, unanswered question was: How did all of this start? We pinpointed a timeframe—many content moderation mechanisms grew out of counterterrorism bureaucracies. Some originated from JSOC in the Pentagon or the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. The shift was from CT to CP—from counterterrorism to counter-populism.

Liz Wolfe: And how's that working out for them?

Matt Taibbi: Not well, right? The lesson is that when you try to clamp down, you often get the opposite effect. But we still haven't found the "source of the Nile." Somewhere between 2008 and 2016, a lot of money was allocated—both in the U.S. and Europe—to build these bureaucracies to monitor content. But why? That's what I'd still like to find out. Almost none of it is public, and there have been few whistleblowers. It's a mystery.

Unfortunately, it's also changing public attitudes. The internet is where everyone gets their news, and when they hear constant messages about "dangerous speech" and "misinformation," it affects how they think. It's an important question, but we don't have the answer yet.

Liz Wolfe: That's still incredibly useful.

Zach Weissmueller: Tracing this back to counterterrorism is fascinating. I remember when mass bans started—Twitter was banning ISIS accounts. Nobody wanted ISIS on Twitter, but it set a precedent. People forget that it always starts with the "easy cases." If you don't push back early, you end up where we are now.

Liz Wolfe: Where it ends with J.K. Rowling. Damn it.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly.

Zach Weissmueller: The ISIS-to-populist-to-J.K. Rowling pipeline.

Liz Wolfe: It's a big problem.

Zach Weissmueller: Exactly. But you're also framing this as an inflection point in the post-World War II consensus. You mentioned how de-Nazification motivated many of Europe's modern hate speech laws, and that theme still looms over this conference. That brings us to the last Vance clip I wanted to get to, which touches on why he thinks European governments fear free speech. John, could you roll that?

J.D. Vance: I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their minds will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don't have to agree with everything—or anything—that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like "misinformation" and "disinformation." They simply don't like the idea that someone with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, vote differently, or even win an election. European leaders have a choice. My strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future. You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it's surprising, even when you don't agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.

That, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It's not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It's not even in the great institutions we have built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II—one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other—once said, "Do not be afraid." We shouldn't be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.

Zach Weissmueller: For viewers unfamiliar with German politics, the context here is that the AfD, a German party, was poised to do surprisingly well in the election shortly after this speech—and they did. They came in second place, gaining 69 seats. It's obvious why any inkling of a far-right rise in Germany freaks people out. It's a particularly uncomfortable topic for this show, with two German last names hosting.

Matt Taibbi: Noticed that.

Liz Wolfe: Zach was just telling me he's been practicing "Edelweiss" on the piano—suspiciously Austrian.

Zach Weissmueller: What do you think of Vance's notion that fear of populism is motivating many of these speech crackdowns, and that leaders should resist that instinct?

Matt Taibbi: Oh, it's definitely motivating them. We've found countless instances of officials discussing suppressing populist movements. They even explicitly use the word "populism." But there's a crucial difference: The German constitution has an undemocratic feature that allows the government and intelligence services to monitor political parties. If they are seen as drifting too far toward a direction Germany has already traveled—and had a bad experience with—they can be legally suppressed. We don't have anything like that in the American system.

The question is whether this power is being abused and used as a rationale for these speech crackdowns. What's most dangerous for Europeans is that these things can be self-fulfilling. Germany's Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) is a very expansive speech law that allows the government to go after misinformation, including negative information about immigration. When immigration stories are suppressed, people still see the effects firsthand. Then they realize that discussion of it is being censored, and they become even angrier. That radicalizes them further. Now, the two biggest parliamentary blocs include a hard-right party—something that may not have happened if there hadn't been such an overt government effort to push people away from that direction.

Liz Wolfe: Haven't we just seen this over and over again in Europe? We keep seeing these panics—Marine Le Pen's rise was a great example. The Le Pen family has been politically influential for decades. But about five or six years ago, there was this massive freakout over Marine Le Pen's potential rise. We've seen similar fears about AfD in recent years.

Elon Musk recently spoke at an AfD rally, and afterward, there was a whole "Did he make a Nazi salute?" controversy. Instead of discussing whether he should be as supportive of AfD as he is, people fixated on a hand gesture. That seems like misplaced effort. To form a cogent perspective, you actually have to understand AfD and German politics. But instead, we default to the "Is Elon Musk a Nazi?" talking point.

This keeps happening: These so-called far-right parties gain traction—mostly because of their hardline stance on immigration. Europeans panic. The parties perform well, but not as catastrophically as feared. Then, as I saw in The Guardian, the narrative shifts to "How Far-Right Parties Across Europe Are Cannibalizing the Center-Right."

First, it was "Marine Le Pen will destroy France." Then, "AfD will bring back Nazi Germany." When those fears don't fully pan out, it shifts to: "Is the far right secretly glomming onto the center-right and pulling it further right?" Do you see a trend? What can we learn from this repeating cycle?

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. The more heavy-handed measures you use to suppress a populist movement—through media control, censorship, whatever—the more people lose faith in the center and shift to anti-establishment groups. And it's not just the right. Europe has also seen populist left uprisings, like the Five Star Movement in Italy and Syriza in Greece. Those movements freaked out European leaders just as much as the far-right does.

When you suppress movements—left or right—you discredit the center. The U.S. saw this, too. Every time the establishment used heavy-handed tactics to suppress Trump, he gained in the polls. It was a 100% tendency, and yet they kept doing it. They never learn.

Zach Weissmueller: Do you think they ever will? Because right now, we're seeing a shift. The internet has essentially been governed by EU law for the past decade. Stanford's Daphne Keller explained it as "the most censorious jurisdiction wins," so terms of service get crafted around EU rules. But that consensus is breaking apart. Now we have our vice president going over there advocating for U.S. First Amendment norms as the future of the Western world. Do you think that will happen?

Matt Taibbi: I hope so. And yes, Daphne Keller's work on censorship creep is critical. We saw internal Twitter Files discussions about it. The narrative about creeping European laws and the U.S. nearly becoming part of that system was a huge factor in the last election.

You might recall Marc Andreessen telling Joe Rogan about his "freakout moment" after a Biden administration AI briefing—suddenly, Silicon Valley turned against Biden. Zuckerberg has also been vocal about the problems with expanding European speech regulations, saying the platforms couldn't push back because the U.S. government was making the same requests. I suspect we'll eventually learn that U.S. intelligence had a role in crafting these European laws.

Liz Wolfe: Wasn't Andreessen's freakout moment in the White House parking lot, where he and others immediately realized, "Oh shit, this will not work"?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, but what exactly happened in the parking lot?

Liz Wolfe: I'm pretty sure that's how he described it—they walked out of the building and were just like, "No way."

Matt Taibbi: That's hilarious if true.

Liz Wolfe: You can fact-check me later—I don't want to be spreading misinformation or disinformation.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, I believe you. But also, look at Zuckerberg's comments. In early January, he announced what was pitched as "ending fact-checking," though he called it something else. But in his post, he admitted that the expanding European speech regime had become a major problem for platforms. They had no ability to push back because the U.S. government was making the same kinds of requests. They needed the backing of the American government to say no.

I think we'll eventually find out that U.S. intelligence had a hand in crafting these European laws. There are already indications—we saw communications between the State Department and the EU regarding major speech regulations, like the 2016 hate speech code, the 2018 disinformation code, and the 2022 Digital Services Act. American officials were involved in discussions about all of them.

Zach Weissmueller: I mean, that would be truly scandalous. That would mean there was an actual government-sponsored effort to free-ride on the EU to circumvent the First Amendment. To have speech not protected by the First Amendment regulated by the EU or at the direction of intelligence agencies—that would be a major scandal. I guess it wouldn't be surprising, given the jawboning we saw in the Twitter Files, but still.

Matt Taibbi: I think I can give you a concrete example. You might have read a couple of weeks ago that the UK requested Apple to bypass encryption. This issue actually came up a long time ago, after the 2014 San Bernardino shooting. The FBI wanted to access a suspect's phone, but Apple resisted. The FBI then hired an Australian hacking company to crack the phone. Later, they asked Congress to grant broad authority to do this in all cases, but Congress stalled.

Then, in late November 2016, the UK passed the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which gave them the unilateral ability not just to demand access but to force companies to translate encrypted data into readable formats. Two days later, Congress folded on the issue. U.S. criminal law changed—Article 41 or whatever it was—essentially allowing the FBI to conduct similar procedures. We don't know exactly how it happened, but the understanding was that since the UK had this power, there was no reason for the U.S. to keep resisting. There's no direct evidence of coordination, but the pattern is clear.

This is the broader issue: The First Amendment makes things difficult for the government. John Kerry even admitted this in his infamous speech at the WEF last year—he called the First Amendment a major obstacle to "stamping out misinformation." He's right. The U.S. has a unique free speech tradition. In Europe, they don't have that constraint, so they've been able to implement laws that impact platforms globally.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter must comply with European rules if they want access to that market, regardless of the First Amendment's existence in the U.S. That's a huge issue, and Americans haven't paid enough attention to it.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I saw you highlighting an exchange related to this issue between Tulsi Gabbard—now the Director of National Intelligence—and Ron Wyden, the stalwart civil liberties-protecting senator from Oregon. I asked John to pull that clip. Let's play it now since we're on the topic of encryption and backdoors.

Ron Wyden: While you were in Congress, you introduced legislation prohibiting the government from mandating that Americans' phones or apps include mechanisms to allow the government to bypass encryption or other privacy technology. In your written responses to the committee's questions, you reconfirmed your opposition to these mandates. Is that still your position?

Tulsi Gabbard: Yes. These backdoors lead down a dangerous path that can undermine Americans' Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties.

Zach Weissmueller: So, I mean, he's basically getting the Director of National Intelligence to pledge to protect encryption. And in an earlier exchange, they discussed using warrants to actually obtain Americans' metadata.

Liz Wolfe: And God forbid they use warrants.

Matt Taibbi: I know. How beautiful is that? That's a Democrat—Wyden—asking a former Democrat in the Trump administration to cooperate on speech issues to stop this problem that's mostly coming from Europe. That's a beautiful thing to me. I hope that's the way politics goes from now on.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, and Wyden sent a letter alongside Republican Andy Biggs. I pulled the second page from the letter because some of the language is remarkable coming out of the Senate now. He says that after years of senior U.S. officials pushing for weaker encryption, it seems the U.S. government has finally come around to the position we've long held: strong end-to-end encryption protects national security.

He then argues that giving the UK a backdoor into all our iCloud accounts is itself a national security threat. That's got to give you at least a small dose of optimism about where things are headed on that front, right, Matt?

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely, absolutely. It's amazing. In a long career of writing about horrible stuff and never seeing anything done about it, to suddenly have this issue—something that has been personally terrifying to watch over the past few years—gain consensus is incredible. Seeing someone like Wyden embrace the idea that, despite disliking many aspects of the Trump administration, we should work together on this issue is how politics should work.

I think Americans should be very happy about this. At least, I hope they are. You're right—it's a major national security issue. I don't care which government it is; I don't want them having the ability to access my iPhone—let alone a foreign government.

Liz Wolfe: So, I mean, you're welcome, Matt. I voted for Trump, and I get constant flak for it. But at Reason, we always publish our votes because we believe our readers deserve to know where our journalists stand. Naturally, I get flak for this.

I fully acknowledge that if Trump, God forbid, seeks a third term or does something outrageous, I could be proven to be a total dunce. And I would vehemently oppose any rule-of-law-trampling actions. But there are things he's doing now that libertarians have been asking for years. The Snowden revelations, in particular, were what made me a libertarian. To now see these issues gaining traction in government—I have high hopes for where this could go.

It bothers me that so many people act like this is no big deal. Or they dismiss what Vance said at the Munich Security Conference as unimportant. But think about it—can you imagine anyone from a Harris administration embracing these kinds of policies? I can't.

Matt Taibbi: No. And look, I don't publish who I vote for because I never do. But you can probably guess. The reason is that I saw these documents saying, "We just need to do this, this, and this, and we'll be part of this common digital environment with the Digital Services Act and everything else." When you think about what that world would look like, we could be living in a dystopia in 18 months—or even less. That was horrifying.

So what's happening now should thrill libertarians. Not just on the speech front—though there were a few hiccups in the Trump administration—but overall, it's been great. Vance, in particular, was the first politician to bring this up in the presidential campaign. We've been pushing for people to make it an issue, and he did. I think he really believes in it, and it shows. That speech he gave was a real reaffirmation of American values. I get kind of tingly listening to it.

Liz Wolfe: Wait, so why don't you publish who you vote for?

Matt Taibbi: I think you have to have a little bit of— I mean, for journalists, it's always good to be a little bit coy about these things. I don't know, it's not like a rule or anything, but…

Liz Wolfe: This is a practice I want to make more standard in newsrooms—whether independent or mainstream—all across the country. To be totally frank, I think the voting record of The Washington Post masthead would be incredibly disheartening to anyone who isn't a Democrat. It's frustrating that the onus is always on me or other independently minded people to justify what we see as constant and creeping mainstream media liberal bias.

It would be so helpful to just have a page on these websites that gives basic information about the people who are claiming to deliver unbiased news—like, "Who are they consistently voting for?" Because, every four years, it's Democrats. That would be a useful data point. Maybe I'm also just bitter because I'm one of the few who decided to publish my vote, while many libertarians don't like that I did.

Matt Taibbi: Really?

Liz Wolfe: Well, yeah. That's okay.

Matt Taibbi: That's interesting.

Liz Wolfe: This isn't my therapy session—it's yours. No, I want to put together an edit of the 60 Minutes segment that aired.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, God.

Liz Wolfe: 60 Minutes did a piece on Germany's speech laws, but they approached it in this oddly non-confrontational way.

Matt Taibbi: Just hilarious.

60 Minutes: If you've ever dared to read the comments on a social media post, you might start to wonder if civilized discourse is just a myth. Aggressive threats, lies, and harassment have unfortunately become the norm online, where anonymity emboldens some users to push the limits of civility. In the United States, most online speech—even if it's hateful or toxic—is protected by the First Amendment. But Germany is trying to bring civility to the World Wide Web by policing it in a way we haven't.

Liz Wolfe: I see that Matt is rubbing his face with his hands.

Zach Weissmueller: Yes—Matt, interject at will.

Matt Taibbi: You know—yeah. The First Amendment allows you to say anything, but Germany is "trying to inject some civility." Could they tip their hand any more? What American journalist is comfortable making that argument? I don't know. I just… have a voice.

Liz Wolfe: No, it's perfect. Let's keep going, and interject whenever you feel like exploding—because it's a long clip, and it would be fun to break it up.

60 Minutes: Is it a crime to insult somebody in public? 

Panel: Yes. 

60 Minutes: And it's a crime to insult them online as well? 

Panel: Yes. The fine could be even higher, if you insult someone on…the internet.

60 Minutes: If somebody posts something untrue and someone else reposts or likes it, are they committing a crime? 

Panel: In the case of reposting, yes, it is a crime.

60 Minutes: So it sounds like you're saying it's okay to criticize a politician's policy but not to say, "I think you're a jerk or an idiot."

Panel: Exactly. Yeah. Comments like "You're a son of a bitch"—excuse me for saying that—have nothing to do with political discussion or meaningful debate.

60 Minutes: In the United States, a lot of people see this as restricting free speech—a threat to democracy.

Matt Taibbi: Is this the "excessive freedom" or "endless freedom" clip? This is amazing.

Panel: Free speech needs boundaries. And in Germany, these boundaries are part of our Constitution. Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on "endless freedom" to say anything they want, while everyone else is scared and intimidated.

Zach Weissmueller: "Endless freedom?" 

Matt Taibbi: "Endless freedom." Yeah. No, it's incredible. This whole thing—obviously, they went on to show clips of armed German police, as many as six, rushing into people's homes to police those who had written names. We've all watched 60 Minutes. This is a standard television magazine show trope: the interesting new policy idea—let's explore it. And they were bringing this kind of cheery vibe to what was essentially a police state video. It was shocking for me. I don't know what you all were thinking watching that. I had never seen anything like that on American television.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it's odd because the journalist kind of has a posture of objectivity but isn't pushing back whatsoever—not raising any serious free speech objections. It's more like, "In America, we have the First Amendment. Tell us why that's wrong." That's the tone of the entire piece. And I've noticed this across a lot of coverage, whether it's in 60 Minutes, The New York Times, or The Washington Post. It's like, "Let's give the steelman case for why speech laws are good, and then we're not going to say we endorse it, but we'll let various bureaucrats make the case without any pushback whatsoever."

Liz Wolfe: You seem to be testing the waters, basically suggesting that this, in fact, would be way better than what we have here. It strikes me as wildly inappropriate, but I also tend to like a healthy dose of fire and patriotism. Am I wrong to think you're in for that?

Matt Taibbi: No, absolutely not. This is another theme of the stuff I've been writing about for a couple of years. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, has this concept they call "building resilience" on one hand or "pre-bunking" on the other. It's about introducing a potentially controversial or difficult idea to an audience early so that they'll be more accepting of it later.

For instance, it's usually done in a prophylactic way—you warn people five months ahead of time that Russians might interfere with the election, and that makes them more receptive to the idea when you report on it later. But sometimes they also introduce ideas as a way of conditioning people to accept certain things while rejecting others. This is all about how to protect people from certain ideas while conditioning them to accept others, like with the vaccine. They talk about building resilience so that the population psychologically rejects certain ideas before they're even presented with them.

A lot of signaling goes on in media. It's not state media, but it just sort of happens that way. The 60 Minutes thing felt to me like a class exercise in seeding an idea.

Zach Weissmueller: Why does it happen that way? You've worked in big newsrooms before. What is going on? Why is media like this?

Matt Taibbi: Because there's been a huge culture change in media. The people who remain in big mainstream news organizations are not, for the most part, the old-school "let's just give people the information and let them sort it out" types. That used to be the ethos. Now, there's a very hardcore belief that we have to help people understand, to increase their "digital literacy" (a phrase they use a lot).

The idea is that people make bad political choices because they're seeing misinformation. So, we have to provide them with the correct information and guide them toward the correct political decision. There's a strong belief in the mainstream media world that siding with speech policing, speech massaging, or content moderation is ideologically important.

There's also a financial angle. They get a lot of free content out of this dynamic. We've seen it where, for example, the FBI or some academic research agency does a report on certain accounts linked to Iran or Russia. They hand it to a reporter, who then goes to the platform and asks, "Are you going to get rid of these accounts?" If the platform hesitates, the newspaper beats the crap out of them. If the platform complies, the newspaper takes credit for it. It's an easy content strategy, and there's a ton of it.

But mostly, it's ideological.

Zach Weissmueller: Another aspect I find really interesting and disconcerting is the gatekeeping role of media outlets. Instead of just being publishers of information, they act as filters. One thing that stood out in your coverage of the Vance speech was your question: Why aren't these outlets just posting the link to the speech?

You've suggested that, in a sense, the internet is broken as a source of real primary information. That's a really important and underappreciated point. If we're only reliant on this filter, then we are susceptible to the kind of propaganda they claim to be protecting us from. Could you lay out your view of the situation and what kind of corrective is in order?

Matt Taibbi: After the 2016 election, a concept became very popular: platforms need to "up-rank" or "prioritize" trusted sources (a term the Europeans use) and "down-rank" unreliable sources.

For example, in 2017, Google introduced something called Project Owl, a reconfiguration of its search tool. Under the old system, if you searched for "baseball," you'd get your local Little League site. Now, you get MLB.com. The standard became "authority," measured by factors like awards won, ratings, and corporate backing.

That's why if you search "Trotskyism" on Google, you won't get the leading Trotskyist website—you'll get a New York Times article about Trotskyism. Independent sites on both the left and right saw huge drops in traffic after this change. The same technique has been implemented across the board, from Wikipedia to social media algorithms.

Wikipedia, for example, wouldn't include the Twitter Files because they only accept sources of a certain type. None of my work appears there—only what people write about me. If major outlets ignore a topic, it's hard to find it at all.

This authority standard is now baked into the internet. It's even required by some European speech codes, like the Digital Services Act, which mandates prioritization of "trusted content." This is a huge shift. Search engines should organically show content closest to what people ask for, not just authoritative sources.

Zach Weissmueller: Do you have any advice for the average internet user trying to bypass these filters? Do you use different search engines? What's your method?

Matt Taibbi: I've resorted to tools like PACER (a legal search database) and Graben (a subscription-based research tool) because finding primary sources has become so difficult. There's a big market hole for this right now.

Oddly enough, Reason does a great job of this. Your site is one of the few that actually provides materials so people can make their own decisions. That's because you trust your audience. Nobody else does.

Even DuckDuckGo isn't as good as it used to be. You have to use alternative methods, like going to inspector general sites to download reports directly. People are going to have to learn how journalists find stuff—digging into declassified documents, government archives, and primary sources.

Zach Weissmueller: Training on Google Translate to read Romanian declassified documents?

Matt Taibbi: Exactly.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I've struggled with this so much. This is one reason why, during peak cancel culture, the practice of bowdlerizing offensive words was so frustrating. When people like my friend Mike Pesca were fired for discussing taboo topics…

Matt Taibbi: Oh God, that was horrible.

Liz Wolfe: A word in context with regard to how they ought to make an editorial decision—you know, that's a good example of this type of thing. But it was really frustrating to me whenever I was trying to report on these things or even just trying to formulate my own opinion. Like, okay, well, did this person whom I respect or whose work I really enjoy actually do this thing that sounds pretty odious and awful? I need the full quote and the context of what was said and what transpired in order to be able to judge that.

It was so frustrating watching this copy-paste approach over and over again from different news organizations, where they take things out of context. It's almost like when you get your documents returned to you and everything is redacted. How is it that we journalists got into this practice where we believe that it's better for us to do that than to publish a so-called naughty word in our pages? It's important for readers to be able to judge the quote and words in their fullness.

This is why Reason has an editorial policy of publishing whatever word is relevant to what was said. Every once in a while, a younger or newer editor will ask, "Should we really put this really wild one out there?" And a bunch of us are like, "Yes, that is what we do." And it stays that way.

It's always been so bothersome to me that people see this as an edgelord-type editorial stance. No, this is just truth. This is what happened. And as journalists, it's important to defend the idea that readers have a right to know.

Matt Taibbi: That's amazing. I know it's true, but it's horrifying, right? I mean, you're absolutely right. Especially in the age of Trump, this became a big thing. "We're not going to tell you; we're not going to give you the whole quote. We're not going to give you the full context. We're just going to—" You look at PolitiFact or Snopes, and there's often that phrase: "Needs context."

There's this big belief in the business now that we're not here to deliver the raw material to you; we're here to tell you what it means. So you need our context. It's not important what he or she said—we'll tell you what they meant. When in fact, it should be the opposite. Just tell us what the whole quote was. Why be afraid of it?

Also, there's the whole Streisand effect. When I see journalists actively not linking to something or avoiding the full quote, it makes my spider sense go off. Now I have to find the whole thing and see what they're hiding. And audiences have caught on to that, too. Don't you think they've become more sophisticated in the last two or three years? They see this stuff now just as well as we do. And it's a stupid practice. It's also hostile. It tells audiences, "We don't trust you. We think you're stupid. Just accept this." And you're going to lose readers doing that.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. How could they trust journalists who don't publish the full quote of the thing they're referring to—or their vote? Also, no. Just kidding.

Matt Taibbi: Well, that's a little different, but—

Liz Wolfe: No, but we keep hitting this theme over and over again: Transparency is a means of respecting your reader. Audit my work. Double-check it. Ensure that what I am peddling is accurate and truthful. And if it's not, that's a crisis to me personally.

Zach Weissmueller: All our documents are in the show notes, by the way, people.

Liz Wolfe: So let's go there. I want to bring us home in a second, but first, I wanted to ask Matt—

I know you've been ostracized by a lot of the progressive left. Some people saw Trump's victory and the results of the last presidential election as a repudiation of the left's social agenda. Do you believe the Democratic Party will actually engage in internal reflection?

Matt Taibbi: No. I haven't seen any evidence that it's going to happen. I expected it in the moment Hillary lost. I thought, okay, there's going to be this big come-to-Jesus moment. I interviewed Bernie right after that election, and we had a long talk about it. At that time, there was this whole idea that Bernie was going to be in charge of the DNC, and there was going to be a complete rethink of strategy.

Instead, that was all suppressed, and they kept going for authoritarian, message-based solutions rather than fixing or changing their approach. There's no self-reflection at all. They just don't believe they need to change. They believe they just need to get the word out that Trump really is Hitler—even though people have heard that 10 billion times already.

Do you see any evidence that they're changing? Because I don't.

Liz Wolfe: I see the slow trickle of Ezra Klein podcast episodes where he interviews people saying, "Well, the Democratic Party really needs to reflect." And whenever I listen, which is kind of a guilty pleasure, I just think: You don't understand people like me at all. You don't understand the people who feel like the left left them. They're paying lip service to self-reflection because that's the buzzy, trendy thing, but it's not clear that this translates into anything meaningful.

I have less interest in this than someone who truly feels abandoned by their own party. The Democratic Party has never been my party. I want them to be strong because I believe that adversarial political parties lead to a more robust democracy. A healthy Republican Party and a healthy Democratic Party are good for the country. But it's not the end of the world to me if Kamala Harris's career flames out.

Matt Taibbi: Or if she runs for governor of California. I can't believe that's even being considered. But anyway—

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I'd be shocked if there's any orderly course correction for the Democratic Party. There's definitely an opportunity for a political entrepreneur—a "Trump of the Democratic Party"—to emerge, someone who embarrasses the Democratic establishment the same way Trump did to the Republicans. That's how I would expect a pivot to happen. But we'll just have to wait and see.

We're going to bring the show to a close with our final question that we ask everybody.

Matt, what's a question more people should be asking?

Matt Taibbi: Oh, that's a good one. "What are they doing with my tax dollars?" I think we're finding that out now, but the lack of curiosity about intelligence services and all the things we've invested in to manipulate our own population was shocking to me over the last four years. The programs themselves were shocking, but the lack of public interest in them was even more shocking.

People should ask themselves, "Do I really care about having rights?" I don't think they have those dialogues with themselves anymore.

Zach Weissmueller: That's an important question to be asking—do I care if I have rights? I hope you do.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly.

Zach Weissmueller: Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for joining us. You're one of our favorite journalists. You can find his work at Racket News. We'll see you next time.

Matt Taibbi: Thanks very much. Take care.

Zach Weissmueller: Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions.

Matt Taibbi: Questions.

Zach Weissmueller: If you want to support the show and help it grow, please like and share this episode.

Matt Taibbi: Leave a comment letting us know what you think.

Zach Weissmueller: And if you have questions or suggestions, email us at JustAskingQuestions@reason.com. See you next time.

*NOTE: A co-author of the New Knowledge study contacted Reason to clarify that the claim that 126 million people saw Russian content on social media originally came from a report published by Meta. That report appeared two months before the New Knowledge study was published.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Matt Taibbi: The Collapse of the Censorship Regime appeared first on Reason.com.