The Twitter Files, Part Two: Twitter's Secret Blacklist Thread, In A More Readable Format

we converted the hard-to-read images to text, and posted the thread in order here.

Last Friday, Elon Musk gave journalist Matt Taibbi a scoop: the story of how Twitter censored New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, revealed by Twitter’s internal documents. (If you need to catch up on that before reading this, click here.) Taibbi broke the news on Twitter itself with “The Twitter Files,” a 40+ tweet thread of his reporting and internal documents such as one showing the “Biden team” itemizing specific tweets they wanted censored—and Twitter staff obliging without comment (“handled these.”)

Tonight, Bari Weiss released the second installment of the The Twitter Files, titled TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS, in another thread. The reporting—done by Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles, Isaac Grafstein, and The Free Press crew—shows Twitter shadowbanning right-of-center accounts, despite denying that they shadowban at all (see Vijaya Gadde’s canonical Twitter blog post titled “Setting the record straight on shadow banning”).

Here’s the thread in article format. Enjoy.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

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

2. 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.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF 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.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

10. All without users’ knowledge.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

11. “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,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:

Screenshot text:

Site Policy Recommendation

Site Policy recommends placing @LibsOfTiktok ([LTT] 1.3M followers, not verified) in a 7-day timeout at the account level [meaning, not for a specific Tweet] based on the account's continued pattern of indirectly violating Twitter's Hateful Conduct Policy by tweeting content that either leads to or intends to incite harassment against individuals and institutions that support LGBTQ communities. At this time, Site Policy has not found explicitly violative Tweets, which would result in a permanent suspension of the account. This type of enforcement action [repeated 7-day timeouts at the account-level] will not lead to permanent suspension, however: should LTT engage in any other direct Tweet-level violations of any of Site Policy's policies, we will move forward with permanent suspension.

Assessment

Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy, the user has continued targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community for alleged misconduct. The targeting of at least one of these institutions

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.

Screenshot text:

Hello,

Thanks for reaching out. 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.

If you have further concerns about intellectual property, your privacy, or your personal safety, the following guidelines can be of assistance:

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:

Screenshot text:

Yoel Roth 09:02:09

A lot of times, SI has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety under-enforcing their policies. Which, again, isn't a problem per se - but it keeps us from addressing the root cause of the issue, which is that our Safety policies need some attention.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”

Screenshot text:

Yoel Roth 11:51:36

One of the biggest areas I'd *love* research support on is re: non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering. The hypothesis underlying much of what we've implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall). We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we're going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations - especially for other policy domains. So I'd love research's POV on that.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by @AbigailShrier @ShellenbergerMD @NellieBowles @IsaacGrafstein and the team The Free Press @TheFP. Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: thefp.com.

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.

Update: Elon followed up on Bari’s thread with a note that Twitter will release an update that allows you to know the distribution status of your account.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal