Twitter file revelations continue: Twitter had secret blacklists, targeted conservatives
Prominent conservatives such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk were specifically targeted by measures from on-high at Twitter to suppress them outright.
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The highly anticipated latest drop of the Twitter files — only slightly delayed by ousted FBI weasel James Baker — comes to us courtesy of Bari Weiss, former New York Times reporter ( but don’t hold that against her ) and Founder/Editor of The Free Press, a brand new media company built off the success of Weiss’ Substack.
Thursday’s Twitter files entry provides hard confirmation of things many always suspected about how social media operated, such as the existence of the oft-denied ‘shadowban’ — which Jack Dorsey lied about repeatedly during his time as CEO of Twitter. It also reveals that teams of Twitter employees populated blacklists with anyone they didn’t like, prevented tweets that ran counter to the preferred narrative amongst Twitter staff from trending on a hyperpartisan basis, and proactively limited the reach of accounts they disliked, particularly those of conservatives.
The first example to demonstrate the secret partisan moderation tools was the account of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford School of Medicine who has been markedly outspoken about the tangible harm that lockdowns had on children in particular.
The screenshot above is of the secret Twitter moderation tools that had Dr. Bhattacharya marked as having been placed on a ‘Trends blacklist’ which, according to Weiss, prevents any of his tweets from ever trending so long as he remains on that list.With over 240,000 followers, you can see why Twitter felt they needed to take steps to curtail Dr. Bhattacharya’s reach with him committing the ultimate crime of spouting wrongthink about shortsighted COVID policies.
It’s also telling that despite Dr. Bhattacharya’s immense follower count, Twitter never saw fit to verify him. Maybe because of the ‘recent abuse strike’, though his strike count is at zero, so the original strike may have expired. Twitter still keeps up with your infractions so that your next one will be punished more severely, so that is the most likely reason that the ‘Recent Abuse Strike’ tag remains on the account.
Next up is none other than Dan Bongino, a conservative radio and TV host who likely needs no introduction to anyone who follows politics at all. He is an outspoken conservative who doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to making points — a man after my own heart, if I may indulgently say so. In the included screenshot, we see that they put several proverbial arrows in his account, so to speak.
Bongino’s account has something called a “notifications spike” tag, about which I can only theorize, since no explicit explanation is offered. It may have something to do with limiting the amount of notifications his users receive from him, which is a phenomenon that has been proven to occur on YouTube, perpetrated against content creators not favored by the platform, such as Tim Pool. It’s not too much of a leap to say that Twitter is capable of doing something similar to its users.
We also see that Bongino is on a ‘Search Blacklist’, or as many of us know it to be called, at least in internet circles, a ‘shadowban’. Though according to Weiss, who spoke with internal sources inside the company, the vernacular that those in the company use to describe shadowbanning is called ‘visibility filtering’, shortened to VF, within the company. Not as catchy as shadowban, if I’m honest. It sounds like something someone made up to help them sound smart and hit the word count on their school essay. But I digress. This tag likely prevents anyone not already following Bongino’s account from ‘discovering’ it through the search tool.
As for the ‘NSFW View’ tag, I’m guessing he received that after posting something objectionable, and Twitter staff branded his account with that tag to prevent content-limited devices, such as work, school, or library computers, from accessing Bongino’s account. A handy way to prevent college kids on public devices from seeing him, if anyone is brave enough to attempt it when the penalty is being pilloried by your peers for being a conservative on a college campus.
We see a similar scenario on the account of Charlie Kirk, conservative radio host and co-founder of Turning Point USA with Bill Montgomery.
Not only does Kirk’s account have Recent Abuse Strike and NSFW View tags, but his account introduces something new: a ‘Do Not Amplify’ tag. Perhaps this one has to do with deboosting his replies to limit their reach since he replies to other users far more often than Dan Bongino might. That or it’s a catch-all tag to apply several pertinent punishments to his account, such as a package deal of shadowbanning and deboosting. Or, again, ‘VF’.
Weiss goes into further detail on what constitutes visibility filtering. It refers to Twitter’s ability to control overall visibility of a given account without the account owner’s knowledge, from the search discovering their account itself. It used VF to block searches of individual users, as well as limiting an individual tweet’s overall reach. This all-powerful tool also blocks blacklisted users from ever being able to appear on the “trending” page, and to also prevent any bypassing of these measures by also mitigating their appearance in hashtag searches.
I don’t know Dr. Bhattacharya’s politics, but Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk are prominent and influential conservatives, so it’s rather telling that they were the types to run afoul of Twitter’s moderation teams for not playing ball with the various ham-fisted narratives the institutional left attempts to force down the public’s throats at any given moment. This information drop basically proves all the things that conservatives have suspected for years: big tech is stifling free speech, and their favorite quarry to hunt is right-leaning individuals.
A more important question to ask is this: Who is responsible? First, let’s get into the teams that Weiss talked about who were ultimately responsible for the moderation.
First, you have the team who I would term the ‘grunts’. Think enlisted men and women, to use military terms. Their official name — the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET — sounds like someone made up a snazzy job title to impress prospective employers on LinkedIn. It was their job to handle as many as 200 cases per day involving users flagged for review to determine whether their accounts needed an appropriate punishment for the crime of speaking their minds.
Now naturally, you can’t leave the high-level stuff to the enlisted grunts. If they had been entrusted with all moderation cases, then Trump wouldn’t have made it past 2016 on the platform, or any other high profile GOP politicians/pundits/etc. This is where the SIP-PES, or “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” comes in. They really should’ve workshopped these names more.
This high-level moderation team included former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde; former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth; past CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and other unnamed individuals. All of whom are further left than a Bolshevik leader.
Can I just say it’s a supreme letdown that they didn’t refer to it as ‘Gulaging’ someone when they punished them? What a missed opportunity. But I digress.
In the case of another account which was heavily suppressed ( very unfairly, I might add ) we see a situation where moderation of this account would have to automatically be escalated to the “SIP-PES” team by the underling team to assess any violations irrespective of policies that Twitter has on the books. In other words, the officers had to sign off on violating someone’s rights because they didn’t have specific rules on the books at Twitter to do so otherwise.
That account is none other than Libs of Tik Tok, an account that shows leftist madness by amplifying Tik Tok videos from individuals sometimes for the sake of humor, and other times for the sake of exposing devious leftist agenda propagated on the Chinese social media platform, which is ultra-friendly to the left, and often pre-bans prominent right-wingers.
We see familiar tags once again that Libs of Tik Tok shares in common with the others previously mentioned, such as Notifications Spike; Trends blacklist; NSFW View; Recent Abuse Strike, etc. We also see that Libs of Tik Tok seems to have 2 strikes against the account. Is a 3rd a permaban? No idea, since I really doubt there were many baseball fans involved in the process of developing these tools at Twitter, so assuming that 3 strikes means they’re out might be presumptuous.
I’m really curious about the ‘High Profile’ tag, since the previous users mentioned didn’t have it, and both Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino have more followers than Libs of Tik Tok, so I don’t exactly know what it means. It may have something to do with the fact that there’s also a red warning tag at the top that says “DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING SIP-PES@”.
We see as we read on that the Libs of Tik Tok account was suspended 7 times this year alone, with penalties that prevented the user from posting lasting as long as a week each time. The reason? “Hateful conduct”. The most vague violation that is entirely up to the eye of the beholder to assess. An abuse of power by anyone’s measure. All for the crime of exposing deranged leftists in their natural habitat.
An internal memo from October 2022 recommended that Libs of Tik Tok, in response to her 7th infraction, be placed "in a 7-day timeout at the account level". The memo clarifies that this 7-day suspension is not for any specific tweet, but for "indirectly violating Twitter's Hateful Conduct Policy" - in other words, she didn't violate any rules but because she brought attention to a damning issue for the left which isn't specified in the memo, but I can pretty much tell you that it was about that Boston hospital that got busted giving kids controversial gender care and got an appropriate amount of flak for doing so.
The memo continues by saying that it will assess future instances of Libs of Tik Tok noticing things and reporting on them by being prepared to level more 7-day account-level suspensions for the crime of wrongthink, or as the left is calling it — “stochastic terrorism”. If that isn't Orwellian, I don't know what is.
We can assume, then, that Twitter would be even-handed, right? Anyone who has used the platform for any length of time knows from first-hand experience that that isn’t true. When Libs of Tik Tok reported Taylor Lorenz — possibly the scummiest journalist on planet earth — for doxxing her, Twitter’s response was that Lorenz hadn’t violated any policies, despite also engaging in stochastic terrorism by doxxing a private citizen who could then face potential harm from a crazed person using that information to track the user behind Libs of Tik Tok down. This is why I’m not going to amplify her name here. I don’t want to potentially be party to harm coming to that person, even accidentally.
Further proof of high-ranking Twitter employees using their implicit bias to assess moderation decisions comes once again from slimelord Yoel Roth, whose slack messages got leaked, wherein he describes more instances of “technicality spam enforcements” to police the platform in whatever way he sees fit, befitting his mood that day. What a diva.
I just know he was the guy that would keep asking questions at the end of a meeting to keep it from being adjourned.
The next messaged Weiss posted from the ousted tyrant Yoel Roth is the most damning, by far.
Roth, clearly drunk with his own power but wanting more, requested that more research go into expanding moderation and supercharging visibility filtering to include disabling tweet engagement for a user altogether. I think from this we can also assume that “deamplification” is the internal term for deboosting at Twitter.
Roth also seems to think you’re not capable of thinking for yourself or doing your own research on a given subject, as he claims “misinformation directly causes harm” and uses that as potential justification to trample free speech on the platform.
I don’t know about you, but I can decide for myself what constitutes “misinformation”. Usually it’s coming from official sources, in my experience.
This message also once again implicates Jack Dorsey beyond a shadow of a doubt in this scheme, despite earlier insistence to the contrary by Matt Taibbi. He can be forgiven for this mistake, however, knowing what we know now about how James Baker stymied the efforts of Taibbi and Weiss in digging through these materials for the truth.
This is just getting started with the iniquities of Twitter staff operating in a borderline lawless manner, including lying under oath before Congress. Stay tuned.