The second installment of the Twitter Files about the platform’s censorship has uncovered Twitter’s secret censorship team in addition to the company’s practice of blacklisting. 
The Free Press founder Bari Weiss tweeted the second installment of the Twitter Files Dec. 8, uncovering Twitter’s secret blacklists. She revealed how Twitter controls amplification and visibility through shadowbans or “Visibility Filtering.”
The Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET, determined the limitations and handled as many as 200 “cases” daily, Weiss tweeted. Even higher up was the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support, or SIP-PES, a secret group that included former Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde, ex-Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, and former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, Weiss noted.
This would seem to contradict former assertions of Dorsey’s relative ignorance, since SIP-PES was where “the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made.”
The previously anonymous account @libsoftiktok was among these hyper-targeted accounts, Weiss tweeted. The account was marked with “Trends Blacklist” and, “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.” Yet an internal memo from October 2022 admitted after the account’s seventh suspension, “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” The committee claimed the account encouraged “online harassment,” but allowed a post doxxing Libs of TikTok to get over 10,000 likes.
Internal Slack messages show efforts to justify censorship by using technicalities, according to Weiss. 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.”
Roth then 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.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk released through journalist Matt Taibbi last Friday damning documents exposing the extent of the platform’s efforts to squash the Hunter Biden laptop scandal first reported in 2020 by the New York Post.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Twitter at 415-222-9670 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
