The Twitter Files

Source: telnet://20ForBeers.com:1337
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter
employees
build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and
actively limit 
the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics -- all in
secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission "to give everyone the power to create
and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers." ALon
the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
3. Take, for example, Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
(@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm
children. Twitter secretly placed him on a "Trends Blacklist," which
prevented his tweets from trending.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino
(@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a "Search Blacklist."
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk 
(@charliekirk11) to "Do Not Amplify."
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. 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."
7. What many people call "shadow banning," Twitter executives
and 
employees call 
"Visibility Filtering" or "VF." Multiple high-level sources
confirmed its meaning.
8. "Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to
suppress what people see to different level. It's a very powerful
tool," one senior Twitter employee told us.
9. "VF" refers to Twitter's control over user visibility. It used VF
to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of
a particular tweet's discoverability; to block select users' posts
from ever appearing on the "trending" page; and from inclusion
in hashtag searches.
10. All without users' knowledge.
11. "We 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," 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's policy on paper.
That is the "Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support," known
as "SIP-PES."
14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust
(Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth),
subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
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:
-----
Site Policy Recommendation
Site Policy recommends placing @LibsOfTiktok([LTT] 1.3M
followers, not verified) in a 7-day timeout at the account level
[meaning, not for a specific Tweet] based on the account's continued
pattern of indirectly violating Twitter's Hateful Conduct Policy
by tweeting content that either leads to or intends to incite
harassment against individuals and institutions that support 
LGBTQ communities. At this time, Site Policy has not found
explicitly violative Tweets, which would result in a permanent
suspension of the account. This type of enforcement action [repeated
7-day timeouts at the account-level] will not lead to a permanent
suspension, however: should LTT engage in any other 
direct Tweet-level violations of any Site Policy's policies, we will
more forward with permanent suspension.
Assessment
Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not engaged in
behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy, the user has
continued targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the
LGBTQIA+ community for alleged misconduct. 
The targeting of at least one of these institutions.
-----
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.
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:
-----
Yoel Roth 09:02:09
A lot of times, SI has used technicality spam enforcements as 
a way to solve a problem created by Safety under-enforcing their
policies. Which, again, isn't a problem per se - but it keeps us from
addressing the root cause of the issue, which is that our Safety
policies need some attention.
-----
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."
-----
Yoel Roth 11:51:36
One of the biggest areas I'd *love* research support on is re:
non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and
deamplification/visibility filtering. The hypothesis underlying much
of what we're implemented is that if exposure to, e.g.,
misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations
that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content 
is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall).
We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity
in the near term, but we're going to need to make a more robust case
to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations - especially
for other policy domains. So I'd love research's POV on that.
-----
25. Roth wrote: "The hypothesis underlying much of what we've
implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly
causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure,
and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do
that."
26. He added: "We got Jack on board with implementing this
for civic integrity in the near term, but we're going to need to
make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy
remediations - especially for other policy domains."
27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by
@abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, @isaacgrafstein
and the team The Free Press @thefp.
28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter's files.
The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first
be published on Twitter.
29. We're just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot
tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has
spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee,
we'd love to hear from you. Please write to: tips@thefp.com
30. Watch @mtaibbi for the next installment.