Tipsheet

How Twitter Blacklisted Conservative Accounts

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  December 08, 2022 9:15 PM

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.

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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.”

And you know there’s more to come.