MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Gets Basic Facts Wrong on DHS Content Moderation Partnership

Lee Fang reviews the Taibbi vs. MSNBC brouhaha:

“…MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan, in a series of tweets over the last five days, has repeatedly claimed that Matt Taibbi “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the facts when he testified to Congress last month.

Hasan linked to a video of Taibbi’s testimony, in which the Racket News journalist noted that “Twitter executives did not distinguish between [the Department of Homeland Security] or [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and this group [the Election Integrity Partnership]” and that emails show and EIP worked in concert with CISA to flag content for moderation. Hasan claimed this is a lie, that Taibbi conflated a private nonprofit with a government agency during his testimony, and that EIP only worked with the Center for Internet Security, or CIS, a private sector organization with a similar acronym, not CISA.

It’s a serious charge and federal crime to make false statements to Congress, one punishable with prison time.

But the record shows that CISA, the government agency, was involved in the very formation of EIP and was one of the most important government partners to the group in its bid to influence content moderation decisions at firms such as Facebook and Twitter. EIP’s own leaders have said as much, and there is endless documentation – from publicly available websites, to discovery from litigation, and from the “Twitter Files” – that all confirm this relationship and CISA’s role in assisting EIP.

In other words, Hasan is wrong and presents a deeply distorted view of the mechanics of this process. Taibbi’s testimony, especially the video excerpted by Hasan, is accurate.

Worse, after being presented with evidence of CISA working directly with EIP, Hasan doubled down, repeating his false allegation that Taibbi lied under oath. In this post, I’ll provide a quick overview of the evidence, including new Twitter emails that have not been published before, that conclusively show that Taibbi was correct to connect CISA and EIP as partner organizations. Hasan’s repeated allegation is simply a bizarre and defamatory smear…”