Nearly every day in the last week, new revelations came to light revealing the manner by which, and extent to which, previous Twitter censorship silenced certain figures such as Donald Trump.
But the core of it always has been ideological. Even when it comes to the presence of people like Trump, the bombast and personality-oriented facets of political figures (and many celebrities, when they dip their toes into political disputation) are, at their core, ideological, or perceived to be by many observers.
And since the polis – composed of federal, state, county, local, and supra-national governments and their cronies – has invaded nearly every aspect of our lives, from our food to how long we can work and with whom, those ideological battles have covered many topics on Twitter. Many of which, we now are discovering, the leftist Twitter censors saw fit to manipulate and hide, often without telling us.
Reporter Bari Weiss’s coverage of the Twitter Files revealed a second tranche on December 9, which contained key revelations about top Twitter folks like “Global Head of Trust and Safety” Yoel Roth, Legal Counsel James Baker, and “Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust” Vijaya Gadde, who reportedly worked together to subjectively target and "shadowban" users and topics they found objectionable:
“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.
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.
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.”
As Reclaim The Net’s Cindy Harper explains, the information needed only to shine light on something that might make leftist-collectivists look bad in order to earn the boot from the social media platform.
Related: Stunning: Clinton Pal, James Baker Screened Twitter Email Release | MRCTV
Take the Libs of TikTok account, whose owner simply reposts, without comment, the woke, angry, bizarre TikTok posts of collectivists. In many PR firms, that kind of amplified spread of material would be applauded and welcomed. But Twitter’s leftist censors appeared to recognize that many Americans (and many around the world) saw the original Liberal TikTok posts for what they were.
Writes Harper:
“The second batch of ‘Twitter Files’ revealed that popular account Libs of TikTok was suspended despite executives acknowledging that the account has not violated any policies. The account was flagged with a big label that read: ‘DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH SIP-PES.’”
Harper goes on to note:
“The Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who published the files, explained that SIP-PES was short for ‘Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support.’ The group, which made the ‘most politically sensitive decisions,’ consisted of head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.
Libs of TikTok, which was suspended 6 times in 2022 alone, was told that it was suspended for violating the policy on ‘hateful conduct.’ However, internal SIP-PES documents revealed that the account ‘has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.’”
And Harper also observes what many of us might like to remind the leftists out there. Not only is Libs of TikTok merely a device by which original leftist TikTok posts merely are reposted, leftist so-called “journalist” Taylor Lorenz used Twitter to dox the Libs of TikTok owner - and Twitter allowed the harridan Lorenz to remain, saying that her tweet did not violate the platform's policies.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton, of Breitbart, broadens the scope on the Twitter leftist tilt and its censorship, noting that the censor team at the Blue Bird used slippery tactics to hide Breitbart’s content, as well.
“The latest installment of the Twitter Files reveals that the censorship-loving leftists running the show before Elon Musk took over the platform used tech tools to suppress content posted by Breitbart News after adding a ‘bot’ to the official Breitbart News Twitter account. As journalist Matt Taibbi explains, ‘The bot ends up becoming an automated tool invisibly watching both Trump and, apparently, Breitbart.’”
Ahh, yes. Fair play. Just what generations of liberty-minded folk have come to expect from collectivists – the kinds of folks who, going back to Rousseau, have depicted as “evil” those from whom they want to steal, have the state rob, and whom they want to threaten and make live their lives as the leftists command.
Specifically, reporter Taibbi tweeted a screenshot of what Twitter began to do, writing:
“49. In Twitter docs execs frequently refer to ‘bots,’ e.g. ‘let’s put a bot on that.’ A bot is just any automated heuristic moderation rule. It can be anything: every time a person in Brazil uses ‘green’ and ‘blob’ in the same sentence, action might be taken.”
In other words: shadow-banning and suppression of one’s reach. For example, you thought you had "X" number of followers on Twitter. That’s what they told you. But, really, you had only as many as they wanted to see your particular posts, and that’s in addition to Twitter (and Facebook, as well) having a special “Back Door” for government agencies to log into the site and flag SPECIFIC posts the government agents wanted pulled down.
It would be one thing if a social media “platform” such as Twitter or Facebook were up-front and told people that they not only would engage in these kinds of activities, but do so with a profoundly leftist bias. In such a case, we would know, and we could act accordingly.
What really upsets people – and justifiably so – is that Twitter repeatedly told people it didn’t engage in this activity. Thus, we see Twitter user Jared Hansen repost a July 26, 2018 tweet from the Twitter cabal, in which the corporate propagandists claim:
“People are asking us if we shadow ban. We don't. Read more to get all the facts. https://cards.twitter.com/cards/gsby/60efb.”
And he wryly, correctly notes:
“Yeah so that was a lie”
Seems like it.
And, given that this is just the start of the Twitter document revelations, one wonders what else is in store.
Related: Twitter Files Expose Seeming Rules-Bending, Pressure from Michelle Obama, Led To Trump Ban | MRCTV
Follow MRCTV on Twitter!
Joe Scarborough and other leftist "journalists" lost their minds over the alleged death of democracy, religious liberty, and more in this week's Wacky Moments of Leftist Extremism with @Schineman pic.twitter.com/XvPt3YHVyy
— MRCTV (@mrctv) December 10, 2022