{"id":88467,"date":"2022-12-09T02:34:28","date_gmt":"2022-12-09T08:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=88467"},"modified":"2022-12-09T02:34:28","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T08:34:28","slug":"88467","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=88467","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Cue the shocked meme…..<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

BREAKING: New Twitter Files Dump Exposes Blacklists, Secret Cabal Censoring High-Profile Conservatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Independent journalist\u00a0Bari Weiss took to Twitter<\/a>\u00a0on 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 \u201cLibs of TikTok\u201d account.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 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\u2014all in secret, without informing users,\u201d Weiss, a former\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter, wrote. \u201cThe authors [of the Twitter Files] have broad and expanding access to Twitter\u2019s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

She noted that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who tried to shed light on how the Covid lockdowns were harming children, was on a \u201cTrends Blacklist,\u201d meaning Twitter took action to ensure he would not appear in the Trending topics section of the platform.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Don Bongino was not only banned from Twitter\u2019s Search feature, but his account was marked \u201cNSWF\u201d\u2014purportedly meaning it was \u201cnot safe for work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That acronym is usually reserved for pornographic content, raising questions about whether Twitter has been using the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) to justify censorship of individuals who fell into disfavor with the Powers That Be at the social media platform. If that\u2019s the case, did they do so at the behest of federal officials?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is some Soviet-style bulls**t,\u201d Bongino told Fox News\u2019s Sean Hannity. \u201cI\u2019ve known [about the shadow banning] this the whole time. I was called a conspiracy theorist and a whack job.\u201d And it\u2019s not just Twitter. Bongino\u2019s website has been banned by Google Ads, and he was banned from YouTube for saying that cloth masks don\u2019t work to stop the spread of Covid. \u201cAnd now I find out I\u2019m on a NSFW list,\u201d he fumed. \u201cTell me again how we live in a free country!\u201d<\/p>\n

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk also experienced the wrath of Twitter\u2019s overlords. He made the \u201cDo Not Amplify\u201d list as well as the NSFW list:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kirk told Fox News\u2019s Tucker Carlson that his Twitter account was averaging 150,000 retweets a day, but all of a sudden, \u201cwe fell off a cliff.\u201d Engagement was down 95%, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was called a conspiracy theorist,\u201d he explained. \u201cThey convince you to stop talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted that Twitter was treating his account \u201cwith more scrutiny and censorship\u201d than Iran and other state sponsors of terror.<\/p>\n

Weiss pointed out that \u201cTwitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter\u2019s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: \u2018We do not shadow ban.\u2019 They added: \u2018And we certainly don\u2019t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat many people call \u2018shadow banning,\u2019 Twitter executives and employees call \u2018Visibility Filtering\u2019 or \u2018VF.\u2019 Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning,\u201d Weiss explained. One Twitter employee said, \u201cThink about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It\u2019s a very powerful tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

The platform used VF to \u201cblock searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet\u2019s discoverability; to block select users\u2019 posts from ever appearing on the \u2018trending\u2019 page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d one Twitter engineer told the team investigating the company\u2019s internals. This was confirmed by two other employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team \u2013 Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 \u2018cases\u201d a day,’\u201d wrote Weiss. \u201cBut there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company\u2019s policy on paper. That is the \u2018Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,\u2019 known as \u2018SIP-PES.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Another Twitter employee revealed that this group handled \u201chigh follower, controversial\u201d accounts for which there was \u201cno ticketing or anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThink high follower account, controversial,\u201d another Twitter employee told Weiss.<\/p>\n

It was all \u201cdone without users\u2019 knowledge,\u201d Weiss said.<\/p>\n

The Libs of TikTok account, which tweets TikTok videos from leftists saying nutty things, was subject to this enhanced scrutiny. A note appended to her account said, \u201cDO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH\u00a0SIP-PES@.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The founder of the account told Tucker Carlson on Thursday, \u201cIt\u2019s clear that there was suppression and there were shadow bannings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I spread [the Left\u2019s] views in their own words, they don\u2019t want you to see it because they don\u2019t stand up to scrutiny,\u201d she said. \u201cThey admitted that I\u2019m not violating their policies, but they suspended me seven times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Weiss cited an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after the account\u2019s seventh suspension, where the \u201ccommittee acknowledged that \u2018LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.’\u201d
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of \u2018hospitals and medical providers\u2019 by insinuating \u2018that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming,’\u201d wrote Weiss.<\/p>\n

Twitter didn\u2019t seem to mind, however, when the founder of Libs of TikTok (who is cautious about revealing her identity, which is why we\u2019re not using her name here) was doxxed in November 2022. Twitter allowed a tweet with her home address and a photo of her home to garner more than 10,000 likes. When she tried to get Twitter to remove the tweet, she was told, \u201cWe reviewed the reported content, and didn\u2019t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.\u201d According to Weiss, \u201cNo action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss\u2019s investigation revealed internal Slack messages where Twitter employees admitted to using \u201ctechnicalities\u201d to \u201crestrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.\u201d Yoel Roth, Twitter\u2019s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, wrote in a direct message to a colleague in 2021, \u201cA lot of times, SI [Site Integrity] has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety under-enforcing their policies. Which, again, isn\u2019t a problem per se \u2013 but it keeps us from addressing the root cause of the issues, which is that our Safety policies need some attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Weiss wrote: \u201cSix days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding \u2018non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification\/visibility filtering.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hypothesis underlying much of what we\u2019ve 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,\u201d Roth added. \u201cWe got [then CEO Jack Dorsey] on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we\u2019re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations \u2013 especially for other policy domains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss says there\u2019s more to come. The next set of revelations will come from the Twitter account of Matt Taibbi. \u201cWe\u2019re just getting started on our reporting,\u201d she concluded. \u201cDocuments cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we\u2019d love to hear from you. Please write to:\u00a0tips@thefp.com.\u201d<\/p>\n

These leaked documents and memos, along with those shared by Taibbi last week, show a pattern of Twitter censoring conservatives, which comes as no surprise to those of us who have been warning about this for years. We\u2019ve been called conspiracy theorists and fact-checked anytime we called out the censorship.<\/p>\n

Kirk summed it up nicely by declaring: \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever be able to measure the impact\u2026 of what Twitter did in 2020.\u201d Indeed. While Elon Musk has done the republic a great service by publicly revealing Twitter\u2019s evil deeds, we\u2019ll never know how it impacted everything from the 2020 election to the nation\u2019s Covid response\u2014and that\u2019s a complete travesty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cue the shocked meme….. BREAKING: New Twitter Files Dump Exposes Blacklists, Secret Cabal Censoring High-Profile Conservatives. Independent journalist\u00a0Bari Weiss took to Twitter\u00a0on 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, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,75,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-media","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88469,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88467\/revisions\/88469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}