Twitter wasn’t as bad as conservatives feared when it came to silencing voices its social justice commandos didn’t like.
It was far, far worse.
The latest “Twitter Files” dump, live-tweeted Thursday night by independent journalist Bari Weiss, revealed that a secret cabal regularly scurried from yoga rooms and omelette stations, plastic cups of cabernet in hand, to suppress free thought whenever it dared invade the woke platform. The built-in rules designed to silence conservatives could only go so far; muzzling critical thinkers who didn’t overtly violate them required black operations.
“We control visibility quite a bit,” an engineer told Weiss. “And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”
1. 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
The pre-Elon Musk Twitter teemed with self-important censorship czars adorned with delusional titles. Two of the worst were Vijaya Gadde, who served as “head of legal policy & trust,” and Yoel Roth, who was Twitter’s “global head of trust & safety.” When an objectionable opinion landed on the platform without violating any codified rules, the head of legal policy & trust and the global head of trust and safety convened the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET) to go after the offender.
Yes, it really was that stupid. Woke crackpots darting furtively around the platform’s San Francisco headquarters with their man buns on fire whenever independent thought trespassed onto Twitter.
“This is the global head of trust & safety,” one can hear Roth shrieking into a phone from the rooftop exercise room. “Get the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team on the line, stat. Libs of TikTok has posted a video of a public school teacher beclowning himself!”
Weiss revealed in the second Twitter tranche of internal communications that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a courageous Stanford University professor who was an early critic of COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates, was secretly marked for “Trends Blacklist,” meaning nothing he tweeted could be pushed as a trending topic. Never mind that the more we learn about COVID, vaccines, and public policy, the more Bhattacharya is vindicated.
Turning Point USA chief and conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Twitter page was set to “Do Not Amplify,” a designation which might as well have been labeled “Silence.”
Conservative podcaster and Fox News Channel host Dan Bongino was slapped with a “Search Blacklist,” meaning if you went looking for what the best-selling author had tweeted, you wouldn’t get any help from Twitter.
“The Republic is dying, and useful idiots in the media, big tech tyrants, and totalitarian leftists are gleefully assisting in killing it,” Bongino told me after his suspicions were confirmed. “I knew this was happening, and now everyone else does too.”
In the wake of Weiss’s report, Musk confirmed that the practice of “shadow banning,” where a user or their content is secretly blocked from the online community, was even used against political candidates even as they ran for office. Some would call that meddling in elections, even though Twitter execs from founder Jack Dorsey denied it for years.
“Twitter exists to serve the public conversation, enabling important discussions around the world to occur,” Gadde tweeted in 2018. “Favoring one specific ideology or belief goes against everything we stand for.”
Despite Gadde’s contemptible lie, Twitter under the old regime was not “safe” for conservative views, and that was misinformation that needed to be exposed. Fortunately, Musk’s strategic response has been to escalate it globally.