We’ve known since at least yesterday that the next part of the Twitter files expose would come from Bari Weiss. A few minutes ago, Jazz alerted me that she’s started tweeting.
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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) December 9, 2022
I’m including a reaction to this next tweet because it’s too funny. Bari Weiss of course resigned from her position at the Times after being ganged up on by the same mob that is picketing today. So it really is perfect that she’s doing this today.
That you’re tweeting this during a @nytimes strike pic.twitter.com/BnqCcY94X1
— Ron Bassilian (@Ron4California) December 9, 2022
Anyone who guessed that conservative voices were targeted and put on these lists by Twitter, come collect your prize.
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.” pic.twitter.com/dOyQIVdsW2
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Some instant reaction:
I was placed on Twitter’s Blacklist.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) December 9, 2022
There’s an official name for shadow banning, “visibility filtering.”
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) December 9, 2022
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) December 9, 2022
Here’s the shadow part of shadowbanning/visibility filtering:
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) December 9, 2022
I don’t know why I’m surprised but the effort to diminish and ignore this is already underway even before the thread is finished.
I think you’ve made a case that Twitter’s moderation policies were reasonable and aimed at keeping people safe.
Read Related Also: Baby with rare condition born with over half his body covered in hair
— (((Dorit Reiss))) (@doritmi) December 9, 2022
Anyway, the thread is still going:
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) December 9, 2022
The most critical shadowbanning was done in the shadows.
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) December 9, 2022
Dave Rubin has a question that I’m also wondering:
Bari, will you guys release the full list of people who were affected?
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) December 9, 2022
You could probably guess that Libs of TikTok was going to come up at some point in this thread.
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) December 9, 2022
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: pic.twitter.com/d9FGhrnQFE
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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) December 9, 2022
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: pic.twitter.com/Li7HDZJtIJ
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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) December 9, 2022
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:
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
It looks like that might be the end of the thread. Weiss’s new site (formerly Common Sense) doesn’t have a story up about this at the moment. If there are any updates I’ll post them below. For now, some confirmation that Twitter was shadowbanning people for some time, exactly as we all thought they were. As mentioned above, I’d love to see a list of some of the people on each of these banning lists. Hopefully that is still coming.
