[PJ] Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular "Libs of TikTok" account."A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users," Weiss, a former New York Times reporter, wrote. "The authors [of the Twitter Files] have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter."
She noted that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who tried to shed light on how the Covid lockdowns were harming children, was on a "Trends Blacklist," meaning Twitter took action to ensure he would not appear in the Trending topics section of the platform.
Skipping down.
Kirk told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that his Twitter account was averaging 150,000 retweets a day, but all of a sudden, “we fell off a cliff.” Engagement was down 95%, he said.
“I was called a conspiracy theorist,” he explained. “They convince you to stop talking about it.”
He noted that Twitter was treating his account “with more scrutiny and censorship” than Iran and other state sponsors of terror.
Weiss pointed out that “Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added: ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.'”
“What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF.’ Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning,” Weiss explained. One Twitter employee said, “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.”
The platform used VF to “block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.”
“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,” one Twitter engineer told the team investigating the company’s internals. This was confirmed by two other employees.
“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,'” wrote Weiss. “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,” she added.
Another Twitter employee revealed that this group handled “high follower, controversial” accounts for which there was “no ticketing or anything.”
“Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told Weiss.
It was all “done without users’ knowledge,” Weiss said.
Townhall - How Twitter Blacklisted Conservative Accounts