Next Up in ‘Twitter Files,’ Employees Building ‘Blacklists’

Round two of the firestorm that started last week when journalist Matt Taibbi posted a trove of internal Twitter documents, some of which appeared to show collusion between Twitter executives and Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, burned into Thursday night with the publication by a former New York Times journalist, Bari Weiss, of Twitter’s secret “blacklists.” Mr. Taibbi wrote last week that Twitter “took extraordinary steps” to quash the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop; Ms. Weiss wrote last night, also via Twitter, that a new investigation showed how “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.”The rapidly evolving investigation is a uniquely American trifecta of competing political, commercial, and media interests, and underscore the power of a handful of big technology companies to shape narratives and possibly throw elections. (“Think about how many elections they rigged,” a podcaster, Vadim Bichutskiy, tweeted from his verified account). Mr. Taibbi’s leaks arguably packed a greater punch than Ms. Weiss’s, by dint of authenticated documents that point to Twitter consciously acting as a Silicon Valley-style fifth column for the national Democratic Party. Yet Mr. Musk, who gave his blessing to the unveiling of the documents and may even have transmitted some of them himself, appears to revel in both the political and the theatrical. Mr. Musk tweeted on Thursday evening, “The Twitter Files, Part Deux,” with two exclamation points followed by two emojis depicting movie-style buttered popcorn — the Twitter owner’s coy curtain raiser to the lengthy thread that followed on Ms. Weiss’s Twitter feed. To cite one example, Ms. Weiss stated in a subsequent tweet that Twitter had set the account of a conservative activist and radio talk show host, Charlie Kirk, to “Do Not Amplify,” a sort of internal control setting. On Thursday evening Mr. Kirk told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, “Now you see actual verified documents where my Twitter account was labeled as ‘do not amplify’ and other threat tags … they’re treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the [leader] of Iran, of Hamas, than people who do actual terrorist-type damage.” He added, “They saw what I had to say as a direct threat.”The document in question was a screenshot of the back-end, or internal, Twitter view of Mr. Kirk’s Twitter account obtained by Ms. Weiss. Another screenshot showed that the Twitter account belonging to Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, “who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children,” had been secretly placed on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented the doctor’s tweets from trending.While Twitter has previously denied dealing in “shadow banning,” Ms. Weiss asserted that newly released documents such as those pertaining to Mr. Kirk’s account not only contradict that denial, but also show how Twitter management gave the practice another name: visibility filtering, or VF. Ms. Weiss stated that a senior Twitter employee, who was not named, told her investigative team: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” To that tardy admission an engineer at Twitter, again according to Ms. Weiss, said, “We control visibility quite a lot. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”Ms. Weiss tweeted that beyond the rank-and-file content moderators there existed various levels of moderators — censors, essentially — including a “secret group” of high-level enforcers who at one point included a former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, a “Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth),” and others, and that was “where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made.”Mr. Taibbi tweeted last week that “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress” the Hunter Biden laptop story, “removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe’” and “even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.” It was not immediately clear from Ms. Weiss’s Thursday tweet thread whether Messrs. Dorsey and Roth had a role in attempting to block the story of the laptop, which raised questions about the Biden family’s business ties to foreign countries including China and Ukraine. What did emerge is Mr. Roth’s clearly vested interest — whether corporate, political, or both — in controlling narratives that end users were led to believe were transparent. According to another leaked document, Mr. Roth wrote that “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 his own admission, however, Mr. Roth appears to have conflated misformation with disinformation — the latter which, to go by the aggregate of leaked information between last week and Thursday night, Twitter has been engaging in on an epic and unprincipled scale.The corporate camarilla through which Mr. Roth and other Twitter executives wielded their censorial batons is called, almost comfortingly, the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support group, or SIP-PES. Whether Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, intends to dismantle that group and/or the “strategic response team” that answers to it is not immediately clear. It is possible that he already has. In any case, Ms. Weiss hinted that the next “installment” of #TwitterFiles will be coming soon, via Mr. Taibbi.On Thursday night the Sun reached out to a head or former head of policy communications at Twitter, Katie Rosborough, whose name appeared on one of the documents leaked last week by Mr. Taibbi, for comment. This correspondent had been in contact with Ms. Rosborough in 2018 with regard to the free use of Twitter by Hamas, a group designated by the state department as a known foreign terrorist organization. Ms. Rosborough characterized a claim that Twitter gave Hamas an official account on its platform as “accurate.” The latest email inquiry was returned with the message, “the email account that you tried to reach does not exist.”

Next Up in ‘Twitter Files,’ Employees Building ‘Blacklists’

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