#Twitterfiles Part 2: “Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics”
The Twitterfiles prove what we all knew. Big Tech manipulates the public debate, and manipulated the 2020 election, including by killing the Biden family corruption story.
I appeared this morning on Chicago’s Morning Answer with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson (no relation).
The main focus of my segment was the Supreme Court oral argument in the Elections Clause case, but the discussion also turned to my post #Twitterfiles Are About Biden Family Corruption and Media Coverup. I made the point in that post, and in the interview, that claims of First Amendment violations created a distraction, allowing the coverup media to argue over whether there was sufficient government involvement to invoke the First Amendment. The important point was that leftists at Twitter (and across social media and the mainstream media) killed the story. The story was not a laptop, is was that the laptop provided evidence that Joe Biden sold his vice presidency and subsequent access to enrich his family.
I talked about that during the radio interview (video marked to start at that point):
Tonight more files were released, this time through Bari Weiss on her Twitter account. The additional files show that anti-conservative censorship was systemic and deliberate. Here’s a selection of the tweets from Weiss’ thread:
1. 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.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
6. 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.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. “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 Twitter employee told us.
9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It 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.
11. “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 us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
12. 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.
13. 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.”
14. 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.
15. 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.”
16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
21. Compare this to what happened when 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.
22. 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.
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects….
28. The authors 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.
Here’s a good point. Your Twitter Direct Messages were visible to Twitter employees (it’s why I tell people not to DM me anything private on Twitter DM).
BTW Twitter employees can see your DMs https://t.co/oFo3Ey9UGw pic.twitter.com/s8jWOW2rh7
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) December 9, 2022
There is no way this is just going on at Twitter. Our own Facebook page has over 560,000 [correction – 360,000] followers, but we are so throttled that we’re lucky if Facebook shows our posts to 1000 people. And that’s a good day.
The Twitterfiles prove what we all knew. Big Tech manipulates the public debate, and manipulated the 2020 election, including by killing the Biden family corruption story.
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Comments
Now what are the RINOs going to do about it.
The same thing that they’ve done for years.
Absolutely nothing.
Which is why the left has gotten so comfortable with it. They KNOW that the RINOs have no balls to ever do anything to stop them.
See also “Principled Conservative” Christian Schneider.
Not sure we need to worry about RINO’s fucking this one up for us. Given Twitter is now under new management and these things are being aired publicly.
Kinda tells you who the service is for. If you’re not paying for it, you aren’t the customer, you are the product.
First principles for a social network: if you’re not doing something useful for paying users, you are beholden to people paying for what you do to them. Your “service” devolves to pleasing the commissars, and their lick spittle minions. So, the Twit-o-Sphere became a highly-curated Pravda On The Interwebz.
Musk thinks from first principles. User fee-for-service access to interweb-mediated functions is killer if you can execute. As the recent “tech” layoffs demonstrate; the other people playing at that aren’t about execution, except for the CCP-Chinese.
There’s got to be a better way of saying this.
I don’t pay for broadcast TV either, but CBS provides a product (in the form of entertainment) that I enjoy;; e.g. Wheel of Fortune.
I realize that in exchange, I give them advertiser views.
I am completely okay with this.
I am both the customer AND the product.
Ron Coleman has suggested more than once that these issues with twitter should fall under some kind of Consumer Protection..
Unfortunately, you are paying for broadcast television. The frequency spectrum it occupies is provided to local affiliates free of charge by the FCC. That is a net cost to you as a taxpayer.
The alternative is some sort of Government run programming a-la BBC?
I’m getting the better end of this deal.
PBS.
I bet he has cable or satellite.
No, you are not the customer.
You are getting a payoff from playing. BUT, they are getting nothing from you. Indeed, you are an expense, if only the burden of transmitting you images.
Meanwhile, they get paid by advertisers for your presence.
That is true. But Musk has high ambitions for Twitter. He said he wants it to become a payment platform, so you can tweet funds and raise funds on the platform. If he is successful, it could become indispensable to anyone running for office to raise small dollar contributions. Obviously, he wants the use to be bipartisan so he can make the most money.
All those stealthy shenanigans aren’t bugs, they were features.
What’s the point of being an influencer if that doesn’t give you a direct line on the DL into the suppression apparatus?
I had forgotten you are on Facebook because I have never seen a post there from Legal Insurrection. And I just checked and, yes, you were on my “Liked” list.
LI and pretty much every other Conservative page no longer lets you know when they put things up! I used to get lots of stuff on my timeline but now, not a single fucking thing!
I get around this issue by using something called tweetdeck. I am not associated with it… don’t have family associated with it.. but it is how I started using twitter. Imagine having twitter timelines, live, neatly side by side….the accounts that you like to see. It is more complicated(flexible) but at least you don’t miss posts. I have a column for elon, one for professor Jacobson, one for Ron Coleman, etc…
Everything we’ve been saying about Twitter (and Facebook, Google/Youtube, and Amazon) – for YEARS, and finally proof direct from one of the offenders.
Legacy mainstream press desperately trying NOT to cover this at all.
Indeed, the MSM is leaking badly on the street. But, great treachery sits in corporate board rooms and in congressional committee rooms – it remains to be dealt with. See Twitter and Disney for examples.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, and the MSM (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, WaPo, NYT, and LAT, et al) in the air war; the Deep State (both the DNC and RNC branches), the DOJ, FBI, Treasury, IRS, and DHS in the ground war – one gets the feeling we’re all just waiting and watching for “the dawn’s early light.”
The culture at Big Tech is not American, and so, they don’t understand the utility of our free speech.
It doesn’t help that the US Supreme Court decided that putting “Fuck You” on a jacket is worthwhile speech.
Free speech is how we solve problems. When something catches our attention, we let everyone chime in. This naturally results in a mass of ideas, most of which are destined to be discarded. The thing is, nobody knows which ideas will be discarded at the beginning. Americans will contemplate, and even try, almost anything.
The employees at Twitter decided the highest good is a pleasant conversation, which is distinctly different from an effective problem-solving conversation. To make things pleasant, they got rid of dissent, especially when people they liked, objected. They created a tunnel, suited to their tunnel vision.
This has cost us the lives of some of our citizens. The COVID-19 fiasco didn’t have to result in useless masking, shutdowns, and a wave of medical malpractice. However, a couple of Big Pharma companies captured their regulators.
They decided that it was in their financial interest to have vaccines be the only solution to a pandemic. So, they told the CDC and FDA there was no other treatment for COVID-19.
Our clinicians had experience with keeping HIV patients alive, so they knew some ways of boosting an impaired immune system, and some ways of inhibiting viral replication.
Clinicians learned how to tread COVID-19 early on, using cheap, famous old drugs. As word of alternatives to the mRNA and DNA gene therapies spread, the Big Pharma companies moved politically suppress the news. They were effective at preventing infected people from receiving good quality health care, and so people died from the use of ventilators and Remdesivir, as well as failure to treat co-infections.
Tunnel vision kills.
I really wish that was true but none of it is.
The number of non-Americans involved at big tech is miniscule at best and the leadership of this is all American, and the ideas they are pushing all come from American universities. Dr. Fauci is American to.
The ideas are American as is the result. We need to defeat this American authoritarianism, and pretending its source isn’t America is an alternative to it not a path forward. The ideas come from mainstream left and the University, and the education system, and is being pushed by corporate America.
Now the European Union is on the side of the American Left, because of American influence.
The path forward is through government regulations (see for example Ron DeSantis) and laying siege to the institutions as advocated by Chris Ruffo.
Pretending that we are winning and horrible non-American influences are ruining things…..the people who Elon Musk fired are almost all American with very few exceptions. Elon Musk by the way is an immigrant and he is on the side of America’s best traditions.
Pleasant monoculture is extremely efficient. The problem for it is it’s neither resilient nor adaptive. The problem for the rest of us it can become huge, and entrenched in the ecosystem around it.
It’s uncommon for a change big enough to come along. It took IC engines and good roads to displace the buggywhip industry.
Info tech seems prone to huge, monoculture “natural monopolies” that suck but you can’t dislodge them. Cough — Micro$oft — cough.
:Long-term you bet for them to encounter something they can’t absorb, then crash. FaceBook is busy going the way of Myspace right now, and Google, Yahoo, even now. Short-term you bet for them to be constant, and unassailable.
I wonder if Musk is re-releasing dump #1 to Matt Taibi in order to check what, if anything, James Baker cut out of the damning files? That would be worth a dump of its own.
I don’t get the whole Baker thing at twitter. Elon knew.. months ago. People have suggested something like what you just said. IDK… Kinda like letting him hide the dirt, instead of trying to find it? That would be great.
Possibly looking for a technicality to fire him, and Baker used the rope given to him.
Could very well be a “keep your enemies closer” situation. Or maybe he just wanted to catch the SOB in the act. Either way is fine by me.
I love it when the Democrat’s claims of Republican “conspiracy theories” are shown to be actual Democrat conspiracies.
It’s like when “racist hoaxes” in college dorms are shown to have been committed by black perps.
Dem socialists are all about subterfuge, lies, conspiracies and frauds. They are starting to come to light (except for the useful idiots and RINOs, but I repeat myself).
Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus.
I think you meant to say:
“It’s like when “hate crimes” in college dorms”
This is smoking gun evidence of what we strongly suspected all along even before the events of 2020
Twitter employees are doing no such thing. Twitter’s actions are under the direction of the U.S. government intelligence apparatus, not some internal “community guideline”.
A few people filing multimillion dollar law suits is great.
Several thousand people filing local $1,500 small claim lawsuits against individuals would be devastating.
The leftists insist that they were just as much targeted as were conservatives. That seems extremely unlikely. I would like to see the stats.
Seven
Eight
and
Nine.
We see that in the strangest places these days!
Perhaps big tech does not like what you are saying.
Kind of like mentioning the second amendment in certain company…
Now, we just need Trump not to douse this cycle with his bullpiss like the last one.
A few thought that have been running around in my head with this, after Elon responded “yes” to the question of twitter blacklisting candidates.
Does the interference potentially constitute illegal campaign contributions?
I hold out no hope that the FEC would investigate this angle, but would an enterprising state AG? Do people acting in concert to suppress candidate X (which by definition helps candidate Y) constitute a conspiracy to commit and illegal campaign contribution?