December 8, 2022, is another day that will live in infamy.
In “The Twitter Files, Part 2,” Weiss revealed --- appropriately, on Twitter --- 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.” And she told us that, contrary to what we’ve known up till now, former CEO Jack Dorsey WAS involved.
The everyday content moderators who did most of the blacklisting were part of the Strategic Response Team—Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET). They “handled” about 200 cases a day. But above them, to handle “the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions” was a secret ivory-tower group called the “SIP-PES,” which stands for “Site Integrity Policy, Escalation Support.” This team included, among others, Vijaya Gadde, then-Head of Legal, Policy and Trust (and also Deputy General Counsel James Baker’s boss); Yoel Roth, then-Global Head of Trust and Safety; former CEO Parag Agrawal; and former CEO JACK DORSEY.
Within their bubble, they dealt with the high-follower and presumably most influential accounts that they deemed controversial. Decisions regarding these accounts were made off-book, as in, “no ticket or anything,” according to one Twitter employee.
Vijaya Gadde was one of the Twitter officials who insisted they didn’t engage in this. “Twitter exists to serve the public conversation, enabling important discussions around the world to occur. Favoring one specific ideology or belief goes against everything we stand for,” she lied in 2018.
As with Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss has an agreement that the documents she reports on have to be posted on Twitter first. But she said, “We’re just getting started with our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here.” And there is still more; Taibbi will have a third installment. In the meantime, here’s Weiss’s complete Twitter thread…
Weiss tweeted that Twitter once had a mission ‘to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.’ Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.” Here’s more from BREITBART NEWS.
She sees this as part of an “overall censorship scheme to stop anyone who went against the Biden administration, “against federal agencies like the CDC.”
She also thinks one reason Musk is doing this now is to get ahead of the revelations coming out of the brilliantly-timed lawsuit brought by the states of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment for allegedly “using the social media companies to do their dirty work.” That would have included the shadowbanning of Dr. Batthacharya for his sensible views on lockdowns that dared to challenge the capricious dictates of The Great Dr. Fauci.
Charlie Kirk, whose Twitter account had been knocked back 95 percent, said, “They’re treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the prime minister of Iran?? Than Hamas?? Than people who do actual terrorist-type damage.” Yes, that's what they did, and it's consistent with what our story yesterday about the FBI and DHS focusing so intently on what they’ve labeled “domestic terrorism” instead of actual terrorism.
“They saw what I had to say as a direct threat to the regime,” Kirk said, adding that he wants to know if they were told by the administration to do this. He recounted a “very warm” meeting he had with some of the Twitter employees, including Jack Dorsey, in the summer of 2018, in which Dorsey personally assured him that shadowbanning was not happening. “I didn’t really believe him at the time,” Kirk said, though he sort-of accepted that answer because he wasn’t yet experiencing the censorship that was to come after COVID hit in 2020. By then, he said, he “couldn’t even get a response out of Twitter.” That’s when he saw the company morph into “a Democrat SuperPAC.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to measure the impact of what Twitter did to our voices online, in the calendar year of 2020...”
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