The former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has some explaining to do after the second set of ‘Twitter Files’ was released, revealing that high level executives at Twitter, including Dorsey, actively and secretly engaged in censoring / shadow banning conservatives. This after Dorsey previously testified under oath to Congress that his company does not censor conservatives.
In the 2018 testimony to a congressional committee appears to show that Dorsey lied when asked whether or not Twitter censors conservatives.
Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn: “I want to read a few quotes about Twitter’s practices and I just want you to tell me if they’re true or not. Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?”
Dorsey: “No”
Doyle: “Are you censoring people?”
Dorsey: “No”
Doyle: “Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans… is that true?”
Dorsey: “No”
That testimony does not align with what the second installment of the Twitter files revealed, the contents of which were released by Bari Weiss.
Weiss released her findings on Thursday night saying,
“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. 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.”
She then listed out a few of the high profile conservatives that fell victim to censorship such as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,
Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending”
She continued,
“Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
Adding that the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was on a “Do Not Amplify” status.
Weiss explained how “shadow-banning” worked saying,
‘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. ‘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. All without users’ knowledge.”
Weiss posted that,
“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.’
However, Weiss said a Twitter engineer told her, “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.”
“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.’
Weiss also revealed that certain accounts, such as Libs Of Tik Tok were repeatedly suspended by the secret group, with out violating any of Twitter’s terms
“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. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against ‘hateful conduct.’ 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,’” Weiss revealed.
