Twitter Files: Twitter's secret Blacklists

A direct attack upon free speech and the democratic process

A second batch of documents has been released to journalist Bari Weiss. This time the documents were not vetted by James Baker, the former Twitter deputy general counsel. Baker was dismissed from Twitter by Elon Musk. Baker was general counsel in the FBI and pursued investigations into former president Trump. There is a strong possibility many files related to Twitter’s activities have been deleted and destroyed.

James Baker

Information released by Bari Weiss via Twitter shows how the platform created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific topics from trending. These tools allowed the deletion of tweets, and the limiting of account visibility.

The former top management at Twitter assured the public that the platform doesn’t ‘shadow ban’ users based upon political viewpoints, comment, or ideology. 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.” However, the practice according to internal documents existed under the euphemism of ‘visibility filtering.’

Twitter moderators can create user categories to limit visibility. These flags include “Trends Blacklist”, “Search Blacklist”, and “Do Not Amplify.” These all occur at the back, where users are totally unaware of these flags. There was even a higher list operated by a select group of managers called the ‘Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support’ that handled issues related to “high followers”, and ‘controversial’. This senior management group included the former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde, the global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, and CEO’s Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. This is where the politically sensitive decisions were made.

According to Weiss, these tools were used to limit the reach of eminent academics, who questioned the official Covid-19 narrative. The top-level moderation team was involved in decisions to repeatedly suspend the Libs of TikTok account, which routinely posted material mocking liberals and progressives, and has racked up more than 1.4 million followers. The account was labelled that it had violated Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.” 

Yet an internal company memo circulated in October acknowledged that it had not “directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy” at all.

Other revelations include weekly meetings between Twitter managers and the FBI. A backdoor portal called the Twitter partner support portal between US government agencies and Twitter is in existence to enable the government to flag and request the removal of any content on Twitter, the government objects to. Below is a leaked email from the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) requesting a list of topics on Covid-19 be ‘actioned’, code for removed on Twitter.

It is believed that similar arrangements also exist with Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

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