Self-publishing
In 2018, Taibbi began publishing a novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, as a serialized subscription via email and a website with an anonymous partner. The novel is fictional with true-crime elements.
Taibbi continued publishing the novel on a Substack website that he titled initially The Taibbi Report and then The Fairway. As he then published the book "Hate, Inc." in serial form on his Substack, that was used as the title. In 2019, when "Hate, Inc." completed, the Substack was still being published in addition to other assignments. It went through additional name changes as Taibbi published both one-off posts and started projects that sometimes remained unfinished, until becoming TK News.
In April 2020, Taibbi announced he would no longer publish his online writing through Rolling Stone, and henceforth, would publish his online writing independently. He stated that he would continue to contribute print features for Rolling Stone and maintain the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper. (In April 2021, Useful Idiots, under its same name, but with some support staff changes, also would move to self-publication.) Taibbi stated that his decision to move his writing to a self-published newsletter service was made independently and that he was not asked to leave Rolling Stone. Taibbi branded his newsletter TK News, after a term used in manuscript preparation for publication and journalism, TK, that stands for "to come", indicating that more will follow. After a period of publication with free subscriptions only, Taibbi introduced an additional, paid subscription featuring content that will not be provided as part of the free subscriptions. As of October 2021, TK News had more than 30,000 paying subscribers. On January 24, 2023, the name was changed from TK News to Racket News.
Racket News is a newsletter, blog, podcast, and book collection made available largely for free and the rest by subscription at www.racket.news. Racket News is published online. It is among a growing number of worker-owned journalism outlets including, 404 Media, Defector Media, and Hell Gate NYC.
In addition to Taibbi, contributors include Jane Burn, Ford Fischer, Walter Kirn and Eric Salzman. Other contributors include Emily Bivens, Andrew Lowenthal, Jared Moore, cartoonist Daniel Medina and Matt Orfalea.
On August 12, 2022, the podcast America This Week was added to TK news. It is a weekly national news wrap-up with Taibbi and Walter Kirn, novelist and literary critic, that is released on Fridays. The duo also discuss a short story at the end of each episode. A transcript of each episode is also published weekly and the podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, in addition to Racket News.
Taibbi is one of the most popular writers on Substack and earns much more from the platform than he did writing for Rolling Stone.
On December 2, 2022, Taibbi began tweeting about and screenshotting emails that executives of Twitter sent each other concerning content moderation in 2020. The emails were provided to Taibbi by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and documented parts of the discussions among Twitter's communication team about how Twitter should handle a New York Post article about a laptop computer that had been owned by Hunter Biden. The documents, dubbed the "Twitter Files" and retweeted by Musk, were selected from "thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter". Taibbi's report was in the form of a Twitter thread with screen shots of email exchanges between Twitter executives. Taibbi noted, "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions" that he did not specify.
Taibbi's presentation largely confirmed what was already known and did not contain any significant new revelations on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Jeffrey Blehar, writing for National Review, said that Taibbi's reporting "contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter's suppression of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop". Taibbi's thread included emails from Ro Khanna to former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, in which Khanna expressed concern about Twitter's decision to limit the circulation of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden. Khanna wrote that Twitter's actions violated "1st Amendment principles".
The third installment, released on December 9 by Taibbi, highlighted events within Twitter leading to Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter. The sixth installment, released on December 16 by Taibbi, described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against several accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation. Taibbi's ninth installment, released on December 24, relates to the CIA and FBI's alleged involvement in Twitter content moderation. The fifteenth installment, released on January 27, 2023, by Taibbi, reports on the Hamilton 68 Dashboard maintained by the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The sixteenth installment, released on February 18 by Taibbi, reports on messages to Twitter by Maine senator Angus King and U.S. State Department security engineer Mark Lenzi expressing concern regarding Twitter accounts they deemed suspicious. The seventeenth installment, released on March 2, by Taibbi, reports on the Global Engagement Center, which was established by the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. The nineteenth installment of the Twitter Files, "The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of "True Stories" raises questions about the government and social media censorship.
On March 9, Taibbi testified, with Michael Shellenberger, before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in a hearing on the Twitter Files. Several Democrats at the hearing criticized both Taibbi and Shellenberger, including Stacey Plaskett, who referred to both as "so-called journalists."
Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC interviewed Taibbi on April 6, presenting several errors in the Twitter Files reporting. Taibbi asserted that these errors were trivial. The next day, Taibbi announced he was leaving Twitter within days in response to Twitter banning links to Substack after it announced its new feature Notes, which has been characterized as a competitor to Twitter. Musk unfollowed Taibbi later that day.
Taibbi received a visit from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents the day he testified to Congress about the Twitter Files. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has demanded that IRS turn over copies of documents related to its search.
In February 2024, Taibbi revealed that he and Musk had a falling out which culminated in Musk messaging him, "You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack". Taibbi later said Musk had been "very disappointing" on the issue of free speech.
Taibbi has testified before congress on multiple occasions on the topic of censorship.