The Conspiracy Theories Were Real, and Other Revelations

The Big Lie of information neutrality was just that: a lie.

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Twitter logo outside the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, Calif., April 25, 2022.

Carlos Barria/Reuters

It was all real — and you can’t possibly believe it was just Twitter.

On December 8, 2022, during the second drop of Elon Musk–sourced “Twitter files” revelations about the popular social-media platform’s behavior before Musk’s takeover, former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss demonstrated that Twitter maintained a wide variety of sophisticated tools used to silence controversial accounts. Weiss provided multiple empirical examples, across a thread of almost 30 tweets. For example, respected Stanford University physician and researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” in 2021 — preventing his micro-blogs from ever being recognized as having gone viral — after expressing support for the hotly debated but scientifically sound Great Barrington Declaration.

Wilfred Reilly

About the Author

Wilfred Reilly

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and the author, most recently, of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.

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