He didn’t even last one Scaramucci.
Four days after declaring he “wouldn’t wipe my ass with Twitter,” Matt Taibbi returned to the platform on Monday night, sharing his latest Substack post.
The anticlimactic return comes barely a week after he made a dramatic exit from the social media site following a public spat with the site’s owner, Elon Musk. One of Musk’s handpicked disseminators of the so-called Twitter Files, Taibbi said this month that Musk had made Twitter “unusable” after the “Chief Twit” restricted links to Substack over the publishing platform’s new chat feature. (Musk has since eased up on the restrictions.)
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“Beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter, a decision that apparently will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned,” Taibbi said in his goodbye email to Twitter.
In a later Substack post, the ex-Rolling Stone reporter wrote that he would be uploading new Twitter Files threads to competing social media sites such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social, claiming he was “nervous” after Musk seemingly disabled previous threads in a fit of pique.
“More #TwitterFiles reports are coming. Holding up my end of the deal, these will appear on Twitter first,” he wrote on Wednesday, sharing the quote on Truth Social. “They just won’t be on my account, since I wouldn’t wipe my ass with Twitter after the events of last week.”
At the same time, he said he’s “got nothing against” Musk and will “always feel grateful for what he did” by providing Taibbi and other heterodox journalists with internal communications from Twitter’s previous regime. He also shared a link on Twitter at that time to nostr, a decentralized social media platform that he said he had joined.
“But he’s high as Snoop in a weather balloon if he thinks banning commercial rivals is going to solve Twitter’s problems,” Taibbi added. “The whole thing’s really a shame.”
On Monday night, however, Taibbi was back to sharing his latest article about how much the mainstream press sucks on Twitter, nine days after he announced that he had chosen Substack Notes over Musk. And four days after he said he wouldn’t even figuratively use Twitter as toilet paper.
