The Twitter Files strike again exposing radical censorship tools being used for political reasons

Elon Musk has been in charge of Twitter for just shy of six weeks at this point and it seems like he has accomplished so much already.

He said his goal with buying Twitter was to protect free speech online and ultimately save civilization from destroying itself.

Now Musk is bringing the receipts and exposing what tools were being used in the censorship of Twitter users prior to his arrival.

Twitter used “blacklists” and “visibility filters” to suppress conservative ideas on the platform

New Twitter Files revelations have come out showing that not only have conservatives been censored but that executives at Twitter actively directed it. 

Journalist Bari Weiss is now working her way through a trove of evidence and will be making regular drops on the subject. 

She said the only requirement Musk gave her was that everything must be published on Twitter first.

She says they censored everyone from professors to political commentators – and perhaps even politicians. 

They used blacklists in search, trends, and the newsfeed to suppress ideas and speech.

“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,” Weiss wrote on Twitter. 

A doctor from Stanford University was put on a “Trends Blacklist” after arguing against lockdowns

The first example she gave was a prominent Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “who argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children.” 

Weiss then gave proof that Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which stopped any of his tweets from becoming a trending topic.

She then went onto show Charlie Kirk’s account labeled as “Do Not Amplify” and “Not Safe For Work,” which would suppress any of his tweets and keep them out of people’s feeds.

Weis went on to discuss the subject of “Shadow Banning,” which Twitter had previously denied in public press releases and under oath at Congress. 

She says that Twitter executives chose to use the term “Visibility Filtering” instead.

This tool was used 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.”

These tools weren’t just used by lower level employees but at the highest levels of Twitter

Though these tools were often utilized by Twitter’s “Strategic Response Team,” certain cases were reserved for a higher level team called “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” or “SIP-PES.”

According to Weiss, this team was made up of “Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal . . .”

If someone was too influential or was very controversial, their case would end up in their hands. 

Weiss reports that “there would be no ticket” for such requests.

Twitter repeatedly used the SIP-PES team to target the @LibsOfTikTok account, which reposts content from left-wing TikTok users. 

One memo in October 2022 showed their Site Policy recommendation to put the LTT account on a “7-day timeout at an account level” to block them from using the app.

They did this all despite acknowledging in the same memo that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.”

Only time will tell what will come out of the Twitter File revelations, but for now the information serves to vindicate those who long speculated and observed the company censoring one political side in favor of another. 

US Political Daily will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story. 

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