Twitter Suppressed Prominent Right-Wing, Anti-Lockdown Users, Documents Show

Journalist Bari Weiss released the second installment of “The Twitter Files” on Thursday night, outlining the company’s “secret blacklists.”

Among the individuals targeted by Twitter were prominent conservative commentators such as Dan Bongino of Fox News and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. The former was targeted with a “search blacklist,” while the latter was slapped with a “do not amplify” internal notice, Weiss revealed in screenshots.

The latest investigation into Twitter’s past conduct, based on access granted by new owner Elon Musk, “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,” Weiss tweeted.

Many commentators had long alleged that Twitter “shadow-bans” conservative voices, but Weiss’s series of tweets adds concrete proof via screenshots that the practice was actually in place.

Another individual Weiss highlighted was Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor and doctor critical of Covid-19 lockdowns, who was added to Twitter’s “trends blacklist” for his views.

Twitter repeatedly denied that it used shadow-banning. In 2018, Twitter’s head of legal policy and trust Vijaya Gadde (since fired by Musk) and head of product Kayvon Beykpour stated: “We do not shadow ban. . . . And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

In truth, it was merely a semantic game that Twitter executives were playing. While mainstream sources expressed frustration with “shadow bans,” company executives called the practice “visibility filtering,” or “VF,” multiple sources confirmed for Weiss.

“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 admitted to Weiss.

According to Weiss, a in-house team known as the Strategic Response Team — Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET) dealt with limiting troublesome account reach across the network.

However, another “secret group” operated above SRT-GET. Known as Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP-PES), it consisted of Gadde, then–global head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, and CEO Jack Dorsey.

Weiss reports that SIP-PES was where “the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made.” One Twitter employee told Weiss that for accounts referred to this team, “there would be no ticket or anything.”

Later in the night, Weiss further revealed that @libsoftiktok (LTT), a viral account documenting wokeness, was placed on a “trends blacklist” with a notice “DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH SIP-PES.”

Although the account was repeatedly dinged with suspensions for allegedly violating company policy against “hateful conduct,” internal memos from October 2022 acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.”

By comparison, when the home address of LTT’s founder, Chaya Raichik, was doxxed in November 2022, and she reported it to Twitter Support, the company did nothing to remove the tweet.

“We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules. In this case, no action will be taken at this time,” Twitter Support reportedly responded to Raichik’s inquiry.

Weiss also unearthed Slack messages from Roth asking subordinates for additional research to expand “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”

Weiss concluded the thread with a note stating that the only condition that she agreed upon to gain access to the files was that they would be first released on Twitter.

Weiss also announced the launch of her new platform, The Free Press.