Twitter Files: Leftist censors used bots and government agents past and present to shape elections

By
Suzanne Downing
-
60
1971

Elon Musk keeps releasing new information he has uncovered about the political operations that were baked into Twitter corporate practices.

Musk wrote, “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.” He has uncovered serious evidence of actual election interference, and his revelations show that former CEO Jack Dorsey actually lied to Congress numerous times when asked whether Twitter censored conservatives.

Now, the Twitter Files show that the leftists running the platform were using high-tech tools like bots to monitor, reduce reach, or completely black out the visibility of conservative voices, including high-profile names like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, Jack Posobiec of Human Events, Dan Bongino of Bongino Report, Breitbart News, and actor James Woods, to name a few.

Image posted by Elon Musk on Dec. 10, 2022.

Twitter kept secret lists of topics and accounts to prevent conservative topics and people from trending, according to data released to journalist Bari Weiss. Conservative commentators like Bongino were blacklisted or, in the case of Kirk, put on “do not amplify” lists.

Journalist Matt Taibbi was the first to release the damning files that show how Twitter was essentially a political organization, rather than a social media platform: “The bot ends up becoming an automated tool invisibly watching both Trump and, apparently, Breitbart.”

Part III of the Twitter Files, released Friday through journalist Matt Taibbi, shows how the company operatives, in coordination with federal agents, decided to ban former President Donald J. Trump’s account on Jan. 8, 2021.

Part I and III of Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi at this link.

Part II of Twitter Files with Bari Weiss at this link.

Part IV of Twitter Files released by Michael Shellenburger, M.D., at this link.

In July, a news site reported that Twitter had hired an alarming number of former federal agents and spies. The news never made it to the mainstream media.

“Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content,” Alan MacLeod reported this summer.

MacLeod wrote that in 2019, Dawn Burton was recruited from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. In 2020 Karen Walsh left the FBI after 21 years to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, spent four years at the FBI, where he was a senior strategic advisor before joining Twitter.

The FBI itself and Twitter top censors held weekly meetings leading up to the 2020 presidential election to anticipate “hack-and-leak operations” that pertained to Hunter Biden and foreign state actors. This gave Twitter all the reason it needed to bury the New York Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Some of the revelations that have been uncovered by Musk include:

  • Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of safety Yoel Roth was meeting with the FBI on a weekly basis around the 2020 election.
  • In 2017, Yoel Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
  • A Stanford doctor who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children was secretly placed by Twitter on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
  • Talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
  • Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
  • 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.”
  • “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.
  • “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 to Weiss.
  • 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, Weiss reported.
  • 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.”
  • 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. 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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
  • Twitter said it justified her suspensions because her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.” In other words, if an account insinuated that gender transition surgery is child abuse or grooming, Twitter would take action to ban or suspend the account.
  • “These latest Twitter files shatter past denials of “shadow banning” and other suppression techniques targeting disfavored viewpoints. That includes denials by former CEO Jack Dorsey under oath before Congress and public denials by top corporate executives. The legal ramifications will become clearer as more information emerges. Yet, a far more significant problem already is confirmed in these files: the existential threat of corporate censors to free speech,” wrote Jonathan Turkey at The Hill. “You don’t need a state ministry of information if the media voluntarily maintains official narratives and suppresses dissenting views. And what emerges from these files is the notion of an effective state media in America — an alliance of media, business and political figures who act, not out of government compulsion, but out of personal conviction.”

Since journalists are major users of Twitter and rely on Twitter to gather information for stories, it’s impossible to capture and condense how Twitter has been shaping the mainstream news narrative and thus the political outcomes in the country, due to its practices of banning conservative speech.

More about this story at Breitbart.com, National Review, and The Hill.

Twitter Files: How the social media giant suppressed the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop just before 2020 election

60 COMMENTS

  1. Used to be a time when you did some big wrong you began burning the files. Were they even too stupid to do that? Even Hillary knew how to use a hammer on a hard drive

  2. This is why you need to check and recheck any information and not rely on the Internet for 100% correct information. Your government is censoring you and pushing you into a corner with more and more regulations and oversight.
    Don’t trust anything the government touches.

    • Twitter is a private corporation as of about a month ago—prior to, it was a publicly traded corporation. They aren’t the government. Of course, I found that out on the internet, so it may not be true, it could be a severe department set up by Barak Obama before he left office and it’s now manned by the Deep State.

  3. We have known the truth about Hunter’s Laptop and “The Big Guy” since 2019, yet no charges have been filed against anyone including the FBI, CIA, and Intelligence personnel who said it was all “Russian Disinformation’ and illegally influenced the Presidential election by intimidating various medias. The USA is no different than Russia and China when it comes to corrupt government officials and corrupt intelligence agencies.

    • Trump was President in 2019, why did not AG Barr prosecute Hunter in 2019 if Hunter did something illegal? To date Hunter has acknowledged dodging taxes, Trump is being forced through the courts to acknowledge his tax liabilities

  5. Update to the quote commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, sometimes to Mark Twain.
    “A man that does not read social media is uninformed. A man that reads social media is misinformed”

    • “A man WHO does not read social media ….”
      .
      Where is this perverse trend suddenly coming from of referring to people using the depersonifying word “that”? “That” is properly used in reference to things, “who” is properly used when referring to people.

  6. Private organization, they can censor whomever they want, Fun fact, this website could censor me for not being part of the Righty cult, you know what I would say? Nothing it’s not the government and my speech wasn’t violated. How is this concept so hard to understand. Oh wait y’all thought Herschel Walker was a good candidate, so yeah not a lot of brain power.

      • I don’t live in Georgia, so it doesn’t matter little fella, the people of the state spoke and didn’t pick the incoherent Trumplican patsy.

    • Actually, no. Not in this case. Your claim is a commonly held misconception.

      If a private organization is doing work for or at the direction the government, it becomes a de facto agent of the government. Therefore they are held to the same standards as the government.

      Plain English. Since Twitter was censoring people at the direction/request of the FBI, DNC, etc they did violate the Constitutional rights of the effected individuals.
      And both Twitter and said requesting organizations are subject to the penalties for their actions.

      The rest of your commentary is trolling and not worth responding to.

      • They were also censoring people at the Behest of the Trump administration, but of course that doesn’t fit your narrative so y’all conveniently ignore that

        • Actually – twitter files 3 and 4 explained that Jim Baker was previewing the first file drop. He was also the one advising Matt Taibi to say “Trump’s administration requested censorship too” – in fact, today they are talking more about it – live on Rumble. The releases indicate that while requests from trump may exist – they have yet to locate any.

    • RINO (and well self-named you are), this form of insidious leftist censorship is not a matter of “can”. It is a matter of stealing others’ legitimate voices and opinions, and of shaping social discourse and society while dishonestly pretending not to be doing so. It is morally and intellectually wrong, even if (arguably) not technically illegal. But clearly, you are fine with it, as long as it serves your political agenda, just like every other radical leftist extremist.

      • So your for prosecuting a crime that isn’t a crime, how Authoritarian of you.
        You do realize the Trump admin asked Twitter not to allow some info and they voluntarily did. Once again y’all love freedom of speech as long as it helps your Traitor Trump cult.

        • RINO, you “whataboutism” is reflective of your lack of intellectual (as well as moral) integrity and acumen. Any possible fault, sin or crime of Trump’s does not exonerate anyone else of the same fault, sin or crime.
          .
          You’re not very good with thinking logically, are you?

          • Rino being deliberately obtuse or having poor reading comprehension?? The “he did it too” excuse, doesn’t fly. If you know it is wrong, it’s wrong no matter and as it stands the claim “trump did it too” is an indirect admission of guilt by justification.
            However, your line of comments is meant to distract from the egregious breach of trust at Twitter, which bills itself as the new public square, through their secret alliance with government censors.

        • In order for ANY of these platforms to promote content – they must follow the rules and censored material required by Apple and Google servers – I think you may not know how to internet.

    • Would you hold a different view if it were Mayor Bronson asking Suzanne Downing to keep your posts off her website?

      • This is a private website, Mayor Bronson could request she censor my posts, it would be her choice, now if Bronson threatened her to do it, then it’s a freedom of speech issue. Once again it’s Suzanne’s choice to allow my commenting and I commend her for allowing it.

    • It was Biden, the FBI and other Government officials that literally forced the private companies to censor and block the truth. Plus 51 members of the intelligence community signed a document stating Hunter’s Laptop incriminating him and “The Big Guy” was “Russian Disinformation”.
      Unfortunately, You, like most Leftist, don’t let the facts get in the way of Your opinions…..

      • While you are correct that Twitter is a private company, censoring user content on the behest of government agents and agencies makes them by extension an agent of the government, especially since they did not inform their users of this fact. Instead they billed Twitter as a place for people to come together and communicate freely. They could have posted: “The FBI advised us that this may be misinformation” and posted all and let the users decide whether to believe the story or not.

        • The “cult” whoever that is, that is exposing this has been clear that the Trump administration/re-election also asked Twitter to censor certain posts…does that make it right in your worldview?

    • McCarthy vows subpoenas for 51 intel-agents who signed letter saying Hunter laptop story was Russian collusion – as part four of Twitter Files reveal pressure from Michelle Obama to ban Trump

      ‘https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11526095/Kevin-McCarthy-vows-subpoena-intelligence-agents-said-Hunter-laptop-story-disinformation.html

    • RINO, I agree that a private corporation can censor or refuse service to whomever it chooses. Our Government however doesn’t have that right and when the Government works to control speech and information, it’s a crime.

    • But they were actively meeting with the government to get Biden elected, and suppress evidence that would have proven him to be a liar. Not that most people don’t know that he is an adroit liar and has been his whole political career.

  8. I guess Trump should be reinstated as the rightful president since the DNC colluded with the FBI, big tech and the media to steal the 2020 and 2022 elections.
    Good reporting.

    • The proper, Constitutional response is go down the line of succession. Biden gone, Harris takes over. If the case can be made Harris is tainted by this, then Speaker of House.

      Constitutionally the issue is settled. If there are provable high crimes and misdemeanors the Constitution has mechanisms to deal with them.

      There is zero in the Constitution to allow for a disputed redo election. Zero.

      Far too many of you want to make us a Banana Republic instead of a Constitutional one.

      • Yet your pipe dream of impeachment and actual removal isn’t gonna happen. Here’s a novel concept, why don’t Republicans stop whining and run actually good candidates, Dan Crenshaw, etc. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the crap performances of the last couple years. All it will take is a decent moderate Republican in 2024 and Bidens gone.

  9. Anyone with common sense knew this was the case.

    Now he’s just providing receipts for the mouth breathers to see. Most of them will still think it’s not a big deal and was necessary to you know, “save democracy”.

    • Social media itself is the problem. Let Elon take Twitter down a rabbit hole of “free speech”—that is, speech that doesn’t criticize him. (Or, like Ye posting swastikas.) There are a multitude of free for all platforms—there are sites to post nude pictures of your ex, sites to dox people you don’t like, sites to post whatever hateful thing you can think of…of course, those sites aren’t worth $44billion. I’m dying of curiosity to see how this plays out. I mean former president Trump just posted last week that the constitution should be forgotten about so he can be reinstated to office—not a particularly popular position, but when Truth loses money, at least it’s someone else’s money. Elon won’t be so fortunate. I’m sure Twitter censored a pile of posts, but it could be for a reason that aligns with their personal and/or business goals. Twitter isn’t the government. We’d all be better to walk away from the social media vitriol and gotcha-ism. It’s just trash.

  10. Whoops. Sorry Lucinda and Frank, if you didn’t like President Trumps uncensored tweets you would’ve smoked yourself over the ones they squashed. The election was rigged. Trump won or would have if it was a fair election. Anyways, your boy Biden just gave the original Lord of War back to Russia for an America hating mis-gender and our economy is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is on the rise and interest rates will continue to increase.
    Oh hey Maureen and Barbara you guys want to admit you were wrong, deceived, brainwashed? No? Hmmmm that’s okay go back to watching the view. Everything is Elons fault now.

  11. Who the F cares? Twitter was a dumpster fire in the past and remains so today. Like all social media, one has to participate in order to be harmed. It’s a pointless waste of time and energy. If whatever was posted on twitter somehow influenced someone’s decision making process, they were ripe for manipulation anyhow and if not for twitter they would have been led astray by something else.

  13. We all knew this. The question now is:
    Now that proof has been produced, are the people within government who were involved going to be prosecuted?
    If not, why not?

  14. What Twitter as a “C” Corporation did, or did not do was up the the Board of Twitter and their shareholders. A deep dive into all of the Dow, NASDAQ, S&P 500 company e-mails would have the same stuff. Elon overpaid by about $40 Billion when he bought Twitter, he is like a Teenager given the keys to a Ferrari. He is now turning a $4Billion private company into a $1Billion company

  16. So, what will happen? Absolutely nothing! The corruption in this country has become truly breathtaking. No wonder we are backing the most corrupt country in Europe, the Ukraine. We share the same values.

    • Nailed it…nothing will ever happen as way too many people in high places are in on it. Democracy is not dead because the mob is ruling

  17. Section 230 was a joke. The internet is more of utility, and should have had more thoughtful laws written regarding it.

    When I went to college for computer science in the 90s, we were taught that we were in the Information Age. We were also taught that the future would bring the Disinformation Age.

  18. Nothing, other than conservative outrage, will ever come from this. The mainstream media isn’t even reporting the story, and those morons in the White House have already dismissed it as “old news”. Any specifics of the FBI/CIA/DNI/DHS involvement have surely been scrubbed by Jim Baker (I can’t believe he was still able to vet that first big release last week.) I’m still waiting to see any evidence of what laws were actually broken. Twitter has no contractual obligation to publish any of its users’ posts.

    It’s curious how everyone, even Musk, seems to be covering for Dorsey. I think he’s neck deep in all of this.

    And Congress, cowering in fear of losing big-tech donations, will never fix this situation.

  19. This is no surprise. After all the big techs said after the 2016 election they couldn’t let that happen again, and guess what? They delivered on their promise by influencing the outcome of the 2020 and 2022 elections in the Dems favor. And the covid revelations should give enough for the people damaged by their lies to go after them all, personally sue them for all they’ve scammed off their flock. Facebook and Google up next.

  20. Explain this, or are you gonna conveniently ignore that both sides did it.
    “Twitter in 2020 granted requests from both President Donald Trump’s White House and candidate Joe Biden’s campaign to remove content, according to a thread published Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.”

  21. I’m honestly amazed by all of the federal government agent/former spy and private sector social media in breeding, it makes sense and I knew it was happening but this is pretty blatant in your face high level stuff beyond what even I imagined.

    Books have been written about this kind of thing, very Orwellian.

  22. “…….to shape elections………”
    Trust a journalist to wordsmith a new verb to somehow change the one that they’ve been using over the previous couple of years.
    It looks like “collusion” to me. They need a few years in prison.

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