{"id":8353,"date":"2022-12-09T11:20:29","date_gmt":"2022-12-09T16:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=8353"},"modified":"2022-12-09T11:20:29","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T16:20:29","slug":"the-twitter-files-part-ii-twitters-secret-blacklists-under-the-pre-musk-silicon-valley-censors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=8353","title":{"rendered":"THE TWITTER FILES, PART II – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists Under the Pre-Musk Silicon Valley Censors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

THE TWITTER FILES, PART II – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\"Tylerby Tyler DurdenFriday, Dec 09, 2022 – 05:51 AM<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After nearly a week’s delay on the second installment of “THE TWITTER FILES” – Twitter’s internal correspondence surrounding their decision to censor the New York Post<\/em>‘s Hunter Biden laptop story – Journalist Bari Weiss (@bariweiss<\/a>) has begun releasing more information<\/strong> via Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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EU rules Google must remove wrong search results<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2. Twitter once had a mission \u201cto give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.\u201d Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.3. Take, for example, Stanford\u2019s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya<\/a>) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a \u201cTrends Blacklist,\u201d which prevented his tweets from trending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino<\/a>), who at one point was slapped with a \u201cSearch Blacklist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11<\/a>) to \u201cDo Not Amplify.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> 7. What many people call \u201cshadow banning,\u201d Twitter executives and employees call \u201cVisibility Filtering\u201d or \u201cVF.\u201d <\/strong>Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. 8. \u201cThink about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It\u2019s a very powerful tool,\u201d one senior Twitter employee told us. 9. \u201cVF\u201d refers to Twitter\u2019s control over user visibility.<\/strong> It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet\u2019s discoverability; to block select users\u2019 posts from ever appearing on the \u201ctrending\u201d page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. 10. All without users\u2019 knowledge. 11. \u201cWe 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<\/strong>,\u201d one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed. 12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day. 13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company\u2019s policy on paper.<\/strong> That is the \u201cSite Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,\u201d known as \u201cSIP-PES.\u201d 14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde<\/strong>), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth<\/strong>), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal<\/strong>, and others. 15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made<\/strong>. \u201cThink high follower account, controversial,\u201d another Twitter employee told us. For these \u201cthere would be no ticket or anything.\u201d 16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014an account that was on the \u201cTrends Blacklist\u201d and was designated as \u201cDo Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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17. The account\u2014which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers\u2014was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter\u2019s policy against \u201chateful conduct.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that \u201cLTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” See here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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20. The committee justified her suspensions internally <\/strong>by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of \u201chospitals and medical providers\u201d by insinuating \u201cthat gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022.<\/strong> A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here\u2019s Yoel Roth, Twitter\u2019s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding \u201cnon-removal policy intervention<\/strong>s like disabling engagements and deamplification\/visibility filtering.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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25. Roth wrote: \u201cThe hypothesis underlying much of what we\u2019ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure<\/strong>, and limiting the spread\/virality of content is a good way to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

26. He added: \u201cWe got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term<\/strong>, but we\u2019re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations \u2013 especially for other policy domains.\u201d27. There is more to come on this story<\/strong>, which was reported by @abigailshrier<\/a>@shellenbergermd<\/a>@nelliebowles<\/a>@isaacgrafstein<\/a> and the team The Free Press @thefp<\/a>. Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: http:\/\/thefp.com<\/a>. \/Fin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE TWITTER FILES, PART II – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists by Tyler DurdenFriday, Dec 09, 2022 – 05:51 AM After nearly a week’s delay on the second installment of “THE TWITTER FILES” – Twitter’s internal correspondence surrounding their decision to censor … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4501,4139,4503,4500,4502,4498,4499,4504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8354,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8353\/revisions\/8354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}