Inside old Twitter's censorship regime
It was all real — and you can’t possibly believe it was just Twitter.
On December 8, 2022, during the second drop of Elon Musk–sourced “Twitter files” revelations about the popular social-media platform’s behavior before Musk’s takeover, former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss demonstrated that Twitter maintained a wide variety of sophisticated tools used to silence controversial accounts. Weiss provided multiple empirical examples, across a thread of almost 30 tweets. For example, respected Stanford University physician and researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” in 2021 — preventing his micro-blogs from ever being recognized as having gone viral — after expressing support for the hotly debated but scientifically sound Great Barrington Declaration.
The Pac-12 medical man was hardly alone. One tweet down, Weiss revealed that popular right-wing radio host Dan Bongino was placed on a “search blacklist”: You literally couldn’t look the guy up using a computer, at least on Twitter. Effective conservative campus activist Charlie Kirk, the man behind those Turning Point USA events, had his account set to “do not amplify”: apparently an even broader punishment. The screen captures that Weiss posted of popular Twitter accounts as seen from the site’s IT/Management side are absurdly Orwellian, full of brightly colored control tabs including “NSFW View,” “Notifications Spike,” a “Multiple Accounts” warning, and a real-time tracker of “Strikes” against an account.
While Weiss does not explicitly say this, it is obvious that these tools were used to restrict the reach of (at the very least) tens of thousands of accounts. Popular tools such as Shadowbird and shadowban.yuzuriza.com famously allow users to check out the “ban status” of their Twitter pages. Millions of netizens have used them over the past few years, and the answer for some substantial percentage of them has been: “Yes — banned.” It is also no secret that conservatives were hardest hit here: Elon Musk himself recently announced on video that virtually all paranoid political “conspiracies” about his platform have turned out to be true, while Daily Wire eminence Ben Shapiro simply pointed out that his social-media audience has grown by almost 1 million since Musk dropped various Twitter restrictions.
Despite hysterical, deck-of-the-Titanic attempts by mainstream media “journalists” to downplay the entire Twitter scandal (the “Twitter files” is now on something like release No. 10), all of this matters. First, while it is surely true that most info-platforms have biases — CNN’s Don Lemon isn’t about to interview me anytime soon, and I don’t see Ibram X. Kendi on Hannity very often — Twitter has very publicly denied that it does. In 2018, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said simply: “We don’t shadow-ban conservatives — period.” This claim has been made, almost verbatim, over and over: Any National Review reader has quite likely heard it during formal congressional hearings. The digital town square was always supposed to be open, and free, and fair.
We now know it never was. Further, only a complete naïf of a fluffy bunny would believe that the problem of censorship at this level begins and ends with Twitter. Almost all prominent U.S. tech companies are staffed by ambitious Ivy League and Big Ten grads substantially similar to Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth, and they measurably behave in the same way. Facebook, for example, independently quashed 2020’s now-notorious Hunter Biden laptop story within days of Twitter’s decision to do so and made the call for virtually identical reasons (notably vague government warnings about “Russian disinfo”). Almost certainly, information curation at a level previously unsuspected by most “normies” goes on constantly across the entire U.S. discursive sector.
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The "Russian disinformation" scam used as an excuse for censorship never made much sense to me. It was illogical to think that Russians would want to write conservative material. While the Russians can be somewhat wily, I suspect they have better things to do with their time. It looks like the leftists at Big Tech were acting more like the old Russian censors.
See, also:
'Rigged the COVID debate': How federally enticed censorship undermined science during pandemic
Aggressive policing of controversial content stifled scientific debate during pandemic's worst months, experts say.
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