by Sharon Rondeau
(Dec. 8, 2022) — Former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, who has since founded her own newspaper, The Free Press, has released documentation showing that Twitter employees maintained “secret blacklists” of accounts suppressed by such tools as “visibility filtering,” “do not amplify,” and “disabling engagements” among other techniques.
Weiss’s revelations, provided to her by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, follow last Friday’s initial release of “Twitter files” by former Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi demonstrating that Twitter coordinated with the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) to suppress The New York Post‘s accurate reportage of a laptop left in a repair shop by Biden’s son Hunter whose content strongly suggested that the elder Biden, while vice president, was not only aware of his son’s overseas business activities, but also participated in them, contrary to his public claims during the campaign.
High-level Twitter managers falsely labeled The Post‘s story “hacked materials” to justify their blocking of it to the same level as illegal content targeting children.
Taibbi now writes at TK News on Substack. Initially, he reported he did not see evidence in the documentation of a connection with any “government” agency, but that changed on Tuesday, when Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI.
While in that position at the FBI, Baker was prominent in furthering the Trump-Russia false “collusion” narrative, was fired by Musk Tuesday evening. According to The Post‘s Miranda Devine, who has written about the Hunter Biden laptop story from the beginning, wrote Wednesday that Musk accused Baker of the “suppression of material that Musk ordered released from Twitter’s files last Friday to reveal who was involved in killing The Post’s story and thus preventing derogatory material about candidate Joe Biden from being disseminated widely.”
The censoring of the Hunter Biden story might have been enough to have tipped the election to Biden, surveys conducted after the 2020 election suggest.
In 2018, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified to Congress that the platform did not practice “shadow-banning,” meaning the downgrading of accounts based on “political ideology.”
Those Twitter accounts targeted for suppression included Libs of TikTok, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and popular podcast host Dan Bongino, Weiss reported Thursday evening.
When Libs of TikTok’s home address was posted on the platform, Twitter responded with, “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules,” Weiss reported.
Shortly after buying the company, Musk announced his determination to promote “free speech” on the platform and expose Twitter’s having “interfered in elections.”