Spencer caught the first trove of the ‘Twitter files,’ which detailed the protocols the social media giant took to censor the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the real October Surprise of the 2020 election, which could have impacted the result if the media did their jobs. Instead, they wanted to win an election, dump Trump, and would intentionally not inform voters of the alleged corruption that permeated the Biden family.
It was later revealed that some of the people reviewing the site’s dirty laundry, part of Elon Musk’s moves towards making the company more transparent, were former FBI officials. James Baker, Twitter’s deputy legal counsel, who had served as general counsel for the bureau from 2014-2018, was one of those people. When his role was discovered, Musk quickly fired him on Tuesday. As someone who reviewed the files, there’s ample suspicion that he deep-sixed items that put Twitter, the FBI, or both in a negative light.
Former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss, who is also reviewing the documents, was aghast when it was discovered that Baker remained on the payroll at Twitter. Mr. Baker was one of the foremost peddlers of the Russian collusion hoax, which turned the media into an abject circus during the Trump years, all based on information many at the FBI knew was unverifiable or false. It was a Clinton campaign-funded opposition research project whose author, former MI6 spook Christopher Steele, was taken for a ride by former and current Kremlin officials. In terms of chaos, there was plenty.
Now, Weiss posted a lengthy thread about Twitter’s shadow banning and censorship operations against conservative accounts, some of whom were suspended for no reason. Many conservatives have already known this activity was happening behind closed doors. And now, Here’s the hard evidence. On multiple accounts that made Democrats look bad or shredded certain narratives, reach was hamstrung with little notations about compartmentalizing these posts regarding the censorship grinder. Some of the notes include memos like “search blacklist,” “do not amplify,” and “trends blacklist.”
Concerning Libs of Tik Tok, the account that’s amassed a considerable following for tracking the ‘woke’ antics of the Left, especially in our schools, was suspended for “hateful conduct.” Still, internal communications showed that the account hadn’t done so. It was suspended six times in 2022, regardless.
There was also a star chamber-like committee that decided the fate of certain accounts these lefties found problematic:
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. 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.”
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.” pic.twitter.com/dOyQIVdsW2
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here: pic.twitter.com/d9FGhrnQFE
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021: pic.twitter.com/Li7HDZJtIJ
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
And you know there’s more to come.
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