War on free speech: Matt Taibbi on Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest, US government censorship

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Matt Taibbi, co-publisher of the ‘Twitter Files’, co-host of the ‘America This Week’ podcast, and former contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine. He discusses the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and why it marks a paradigm shift in free speech and censorship in Western countries. He also talks about creeping digital censorship since the passing of the Digital Services Act in Europe, the precedent set by arresting Durov for the crimes of users using his platform, and the significance of Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan admitting that the Biden administration had pressured him to censor Covid-19 content and the Hunter Biden laptop story. Taibbi also discusses his time in Russia and the shift in the journalistic environment there, the creeping move towards censorship in the US following Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and Brexit, the shift in priorities of the US government from counterterrorism to monitoring speech domestically, why he has called Elon Musk ‘disappointing’ on the issue of free speech, his call for a conversation with the Tesla CEO to resolve their differences stemming from a dispute on Substack, and much more.

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