The Twitter Files, Part Two: Twitter's Secret Blacklist Thread, In A More Readable Format
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.
The Twitter Files, Part Two: Twitter's Secret Blacklist Thread, In A More Readable Format
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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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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.
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.
All I can say is thank God for Elon Musk, and for Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and you! You’re all on the side of the angels. God bless all of you!
Thanks for doing this. Those of us not on Twatter have no good way to get to this. So it is not only prettier, but enabling. Most appreciated.