Twitter maintained a secret blacklist of those who were spreading “disinformation,” the code word for material that the platform’s leftists didn’t like.
In a second dump of Twitter Files, former New York Times writer Bari Weiss has disclosed just what leftist Twitter execs did to crush the visibility of anyone they didn’t like. They also permitted the doxxing and harassment of Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik.
In a series of tweets, Weiss built on what journalist Matt Taibbi reported last week. Twitter was an arm of the Biden presidential campaign. It worked directly with campaign torpedoes to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal that could have ended his father’s campaign.
The latest helps explain why leftists and Democrats went ballistic when Elon Musk purchased the platform. The truth would be found out.
“Search Blacklist”
Weiss began her thread with the story of blacklist victim Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, of Stanford University.
He “argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children,” but “Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending,” Weiss wrote:
Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
Amazingly, though Twitter obviously blacklisted or suppressed contrarians its leftist operatives didn’t like, it denied it did so, Weiss continued.
“We don’t shadow ban,” averred Indian immigrant Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy and trust. Musk pink-slipped Gadde and her boss, Indian immigrant Parag Agrawal, when he took over.
Said Twitter exec Kayvon Beykpour: “We do not shadow ban.”
“And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,” they lied.
Like all good leftists, Twitter’s had a different name for what they did: “Visibility Filtering,” or “VF,” Weiss reported, citing sources inside the platform:
“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.
“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.
The group in charge of blacklisting and shadowbanning was the “Strategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET,” which “often handled up to 200 ‘cases’ a day.”
But that was just a school of small fry.
The big fish, Weiss continued, “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.’”
That group included Gadde; Yoel Roth, head of “trust and safety”; former CEO Jack Dorsey; and then his replacement, Agrawal.
“This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made,” Weiss reported. “Think high follower account, controversial,” an employee confessed. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
War Against Libs of TikTok
That group targeted the popular Libs of TikTok, an account that has exposed pro-pedophile activists and school districts grooming children with homosexual propaganda, as well as hospitals that offer “affirming care” to “trans kids.” That means pumping them full of dangerous puberty blockers and mutilating them surgically.
Libs of TikTok was “on the ‘Trends Blacklist’ and was designated as ‘Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES,’” Weiss explained:
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.”
The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
Yet when Libs of TikTok creator Raichik was doxxed on November 21, 2022, with a photo of her home and her address posted in a tweet, Twitter responded rather differently. “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules,” Twitter replied. The “committee” did nothing and the tweet remains.
Significantly, a key player in the blacklisting and shadowbanning was Roth, whose “doctoral dissertation” for the University of Pennsylvania, Gay Data, detailed homosexual rutting via “gay” dating sites.
As one critic put it, “Roth made an entire career out of intellectualizing his homosexual fetishes — even writing his PhD dissertation on his random GRINDr encounters. He then got put in charge of censoring ‘hate speech’ on twitter. A path to power and a reality most GOP voters aren’t aware of.”
