BUSTED: Musk Twitter Files Expose Prior Platform Execs for Lying About Shadowbanning

NewsBusters ^ | 12/9/2022 | Joseph Vazquez

[PapaBear3625]

Makes you wonder exactly how much stuff went through the virtual shredder in the months before the purchase if this is just the stuff they missed

At the highest levels, the ("former") FBI and CIA employees making these decisions knew better than to have anything in writing, especially not in a computer document or email.

Everything would have been handled verbally, with no records.

[Irenic]

But is anyone surprised?

Nope, absolutely not.

[KarlInOhio]

I would like to see the before and after versions of the files Jim Baker handled in the first document release before he was fired. Just seeing what he thought was important enough to hide would be a gold mine.

[Vaduz]

Check but congress looked into it huh.

[PapaBear3625]

Continued

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.”

16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok
—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”

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.

18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”

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:

20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”

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.

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.
Image

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:

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 “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601018077021229056

[lepton]

Thanks for the sum