So, the second tranche of the Twitter Files have dropped, and confirmed what everybody knew: Twitter was actively shadowbanning accounts, and lying about it. (And confirming what we also knew: the legacy media are going to ignore this story as hard as they can.)
For the uninitiated, “shadowbanning” is the long-suspected practice of not straight-out banning accounts, but making their content all but invisible to other users. For instance, subscribers or followers won’t see notifications of new posts, nor will the shadowbanned account show up in a search.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly denied shadowbanning ever happened. Dorsey tweeted that “we don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints”.
In his defence, of course, Dorsey could argue that they didn’t “shadowban”, they applied “visibility filtering”. Which is calling a spade a rectangular, manual, earth-moving implement.
Released by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss in yet another lengthy Twitter thread, the revelations on Thursday showed that several mainstream conservative voices, from Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino, were shadowbanned by the social media company under the rubrics of “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” At one point, Twitter even placed Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, under the label “Trends Blacklist” for arguing that coronavirus lockdowns would harm children.
Remember when Twitter said that its mission was “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers”? Turns out, they lied about that, too.
Because “visibility filtering” seems indistinguishable from shadowbanning.
Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify” […]
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior employee is quoted as having told Weiss.
“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” said one anonymous engineer, which two other Twitter employees confirmed.
Breitbart
As Dan Bongino says:
Bongino reacted the revelations, tweeting, “We ALWAYS knew we were a target of the Twitter suppression machine. ALWAYS. Yet liberals insisted it was another ‘conspiracy theory.’ Tonight is vindication, yet I expect no apologies from liberals. They live to abuse power and they’ll make no apologies for doing so.”
The Twitter Files also reveal that Twitter had what amounts to a parallel enforcement economy to rival the Deep State or the Stasi. Complete with plausible deniability for the top dogs.
“The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 ‘cases’ a day,” Weiss reported. “But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the ‘Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,’ known as ‘SIP-PES.’
“This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. ‘Think high follower account, controversial,’ another Twitter employee told us. For these ‘there would be no ticket or anything.'” Weiss continued.
Fox News
One target Twitter’s Stasi zeroed in on was Libs of TikTok, founded by Chaya Raichik. This account does nothing but repost TikTok videos: it’s simply letting the groomer left speak in its own words. Libs of TikTok was suspended six times in 2002 alone, even though an internal Twitter memo acknowledged that ‘LTT has not directly engaged in behaviour violative of the Hateful Conduct policy’.
On the other hand, doxxing (publishing private information like home addresses) explicitly violates Twitter’s Hateful Conduct policy:
Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called doxxing, is a breach of their privacy and of the Twitter Rules. Sharing private information can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship.
Twitter
Twitter further clarifies that this includes: “home address or physical location information”.
Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
A pretty clear violation of the above policy, right?
When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.”
Fox News
So Twitter not only lied about shadowbanning, they deliberately allowed — on purely ideological grounds — conduct that by their own admission “pose[s] serious safety and security risks for those affected”.
We can hardly wait to see what the third tranche of files unveils.
Just don’t expect to read about them in the legacy media, of course.