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Remembering the Journalists and Elected Dems Who Dismissed the Twitter Shadow-Banning ‘Conspiracy Theory’
Documents obtained by Bari Weiss vindicate concerns about the suppression of dissenters.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap years of gaslighting on Twitter shadow-banning, look at the Washington Post’s take on Shark Week, and hit more media misses.
Twitter Files 2.0: Another Chance for Media Introspection
The first installment of the “Twitter Files” left the media to confront (or avoid) their shameful silence on the Hunter Biden story. The second part offered another chance for retrospection, this time on the yearslong media campaign to paint conservatives as conspiracy theorists for daring to notice that Twitter was shadow-banning right-wing voices.
For years, Twitter executives and journalists dismissed the shadow-banning complaints. Documents revealed by journalist Bari Weiss on Thursday proved the so-called “conspiracy theorists” were right all along.
The documents reveal the platform kept “secret blacklists” that targeted prominent right-wing commentators, including Dan Bongino, who was placed on a “search blacklist,” and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who was given a “Do Not Amplify” label.
Stanford professor and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya was added to Twitter’s “trends blacklist” for speaking critically of Covid-19 lockdowns.
Bhattacharya coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter from infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists expressing “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” The declaration turned out to be quite prescient, but Twitter users were deprived of this author’s insights based on the whims of tech executives who lack his expertise in public health. In a show of transparency, Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk invited Bhattacharya to the company’s headquarters over the weekend to learn more about the obscure bureaucratic processes that landed him on the naughty list.
Weiss reported “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.”
Internally, company executives called the practice “visibility filtering,” or “VF,” Weiss reported.
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” a senior Twitter employee told Weiss.
“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,” two Twitter employees told her.
The concept of “shadow-banning” burst into the public consciousness in July 2018 when Vice News reported that a number of Republican politicians’ accounts were not appearing in suggested searches on the site when their names were typed in.
Then-President Trump said the site was “‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Vijaya Gadde, who was Twitter’s head of legal policy and trust, and Kayvon Beykpour, the site’s head of product at the time, dismissed the claims, saying: “We do not shadow ban. . . . And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
Here’s @Jack telling @brianstelter in 2018 that Twitter doesn’t shadow ban conservatives pic.twitter.com/XheWlJQ7ET
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 9, 2022
The mainstream media chose to take Twitter at its word.
A Vanity Fair headline on shadow-banning from August 2018 says, “Jack Dorsey breathes life into the right’s favorite conspiracy.”
“In admitting to his ‘left-leaning’ bias, Dorsey effectively handed conservatives more ammunition, perpetuating the cycle that forces him to continually tiptoe around them,” the report said.
The piece cited the Vice News article, which it said “falsely claimed that Twitter shadow bans conservatives, i.e. covertly restricts the reach of their posts. Twitter insisted it does no such thing…”
Similarly, from Vox one month later: “How hysteria over Twitter shadow-banning led to a bizarre congressional hearing.” The piece called shadow-banning a “persistent conspiracy theory” and called then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s day on Capitol Hill a “waste of everyone’s time.”
MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt said the shadow-banning accusations had been “debunked by Twitter” in March 2019.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy has repeatedly downplayed conservative concerns, including in May 2020 when he wrote: “Trump says right-wing voices are being censored. The data says something else.” However, the article focused entirely on data from Facebook, leaving out Twitter.
CNN’s Hunter Schwarz wrote a piece called, “Donald Trump Jr. has a history of incorrectly suggesting Twitter is censoring or blocking tweets.”
Democratic lawmakers defended Big Tech as well.
“Republicans have this warped perception that Google and Facebook and others are shadow banning them,” Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) told Axios earlier this year. “In their warped minds, they think that they’re being affected by Big Tech.”
In 2018, Representative Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) replied to Trump’s aforementioned tweet to say: “House Judiciary Committee held two hearings on this issue. Twitter is not ‘shadow banning’ prominent Republicans, or Diamond & Silk. Also, private companies can do whatever they want with speech. What would be illegal is government regulating speech content or speech algorithms.”
After the release of the Twitter files 2.0, RealClearInvestigation’s Mark Hemingway predicted that the “defense of Twitter’s conduct on the left is now going to rapidly shift from ‘they did nothing wrong’ to ‘those people deserved to be censored.’
The defense of Twitter’s conduct on the left is now going to rapidly shift from “they did nothing wrong” to “those people deserved to be censored.”
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) December 9, 2022
Lieu quickly proved Hemingway right.
The congressman replied to a tweet from Elon Musk in which the Twitter CEO said, “Twitter’s rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left.”
“This post by @elonmusk assumes the right and the left are somehow the same. We are not,” Lieu replied. “Folks on the right said COVID was a hoax. Folks on the left said it was not. Twitter absolutely had the right to enforce rules against COVID deniers, who were disproportionally on the right.”
Beykpour tried to downplay Weiss’s report, saying: “We never denied de-amplifying things. In fact, we made clear that we do rank. We defined exactly what we meant by ‘shadow banning’ (b/c there are many definitions) and made very clear that we didn’t do *that*…”
He claimed the journalist was “deliberately misleading” readers or creating a “lazy interpretation” by equating “de-amplification” with “shadow banning.”
However, Dictionary.com defines shadow-banning much as Weiss, and the rest of the public, has: “The practice used in online moderation that consists of preventing a user’s content from being seen by others – either partially or totally – without the user being notified or aware of it.”
Still, despite the chance for redemption, much of the media has remained silent in the wake of Weiss’s reporting. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and MSNBC all ignored the story on the day of its release and the day after, according to Joe Concha.
NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who peddled the “PR work for the richest person in the world” line we discussed in last week’s column, replied to Weiss’s report with only a yawning emoji.
Headline Fail of the Week
DEI comes for Shark Week in a Washington Post article that, at first glance, appears to be parody: “‘Shark Week’ lacks diversity, overrepresents men named Mike, scientists say.”
The story gives voice to Lisa Whitenack, a biology professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., who said she rarely saw women scientists on TV when she was growing up watching Discovery’s Shark Week.
“Why would I know I could do that?” Whitenack said. “I don’t come from a family of scientists. I didn’t see very many people that looked like me on television.”
The story explains: “Whitenack led a team of researchers to examine hundreds of ‘Shark Week’ episodes that aired between 1988 and 2020. In a study published last month by the Public Library of Science, their research claims that Discovery’s programming emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation and overwhelmingly featured White men as experts — including several with the same name.”
The study found the program, which has been on the air for 34 years, featured more white experts and commentators named “Mike” than women.
Media Misses
• The AP stylebook instructs reporters not to use the phrase “late-term abortion.”
Do not use the term “late-term abortion.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines late term as 41 weeks through 41 weeks and 6 days of gestation, and abortion does not happen in this period. pic.twitter.com/KjT1k9rDSS
— APStylebook (@APStylebook) December 6, 2022
• Journalist Olivia Reingold explains her decision to join Bari Weiss’s new outlet, the Free Press, and offers a look inside reporting for mainstream media when you refuse to give in to the political hive mind:
Why I joined @thefp:
I knew I didn’t fit in when Politico let @benshapiro guest write an edition of Playbook. I told a colleague I was stoked because “this helps legitimize us.” They responded that they were taking a mental health day to process ‘Shapirogate.’
— Olivia Reingold (@Olivia_Reingold) December 9, 2022
• The New York Times’ editorial board published a column on Saturday about “America’s Toxic Gun Culture,” suggesting the use of AR-15s by “right-wing” figures is sparking a rise in political violence. However, the paper affixed a photo of rows of shotgun shells to the editorial, despite the fact that such ammo would not be used in AR-15 weapons.
The AR-15 has become a talisman for some right-wing politicians and voters. “That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising,” writes the editorial board. https://t.co/xLqthLEkSA
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) December 10, 2022