Call me when we've had a verified audit and report and detailed breakdown of all censorship. I want database dumps, SQL statements, verifiable guids and URLs, etc. Until then that's just a grey blob of hearsay and may very well be "true" but doesn't represent reality. We need to see the raw data.
I'm surprised that someone as interested in this as you has not followed up to try and see whether Taibbi's worrying thesis has any merit.
He, and Shellenberger and the other writers at "Public" are slowly revealing the outlines of something disturbing. Namely that social media companies take the direction of state surveillance and espionage actors -- including those of foreign (Israeli and Ukrainian secret services) governments, currently considered allies. This is being revealed to be effected through a sinister network of supposed "civil society" NGOs and 501c3s. That's a worrying idea to anyone that considers themself a democrat or a republican (in the non-partisan sense).
If you had followed up on this you would have noticed that although Taibbi rapidly admitted conflating CISA and CIS a further look suggests that the CIS is deeply inter-twined with the DHS and that Taibbi was correct about the CISA's involvement with the EIP. Taibbi is good at admitting his errors and correcting them publicly and rapidly: https://www.racket.news/p/lee-fang-vs-mehdi-hasan-round-2
With regard to the 22 million versus 3000 , Taibbi's co-author Michael Shellenberger notes that:
“Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright,” explained Mike Benz, the State Department official-turned-whistleblower. “Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.”
Taibbi pointed out that the 3,000 number was chosen to hide the full extent of the censorship. “They're playing games with terms like ‘unique original URL,’” tweeted Taibbi, “where more than 1000 tweets can be "collapsed" into one ‘incident.’”
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how many posts they censored. No amount is acceptable.
Again, as stated in my original response to this: yes, the full dump would be ideal, but it is definitely worth considering what Taibbi says. If he's right this needs to be stopped now, if he's wrong then trying to safeguard against the massive abuses and manipulation will not cause harm.
