90 Miles From Tyranny : TWITTER EXPOSED: Blacklists, Secret Censorship Cabal, Treachery at the Highest Levels

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Saturday, December 10, 2022

TWITTER EXPOSED: Blacklists, Secret Censorship Cabal, Treachery at the Highest Levels


Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular “Libs of TikTok” account.

“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,” Weiss, a former New York Times reporter, wrote. “The authors [of the Twitter Files] 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.”

She noted that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who tried to shed light on how the Covid lockdowns were harming children, was on a “Trends Blacklist,” meaning Twitter took action to ensure he would not appear in the Trending topics section of the platform.


Don Bongino was not only banned from Twitter’s Search feature, but his account was marked “NSWF”—purportedly meaning it was “not safe for work.”


That acronym is usually reserved for pornographic content, raising questions about whether Twitter has been using the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) to justify censorship of individuals who fell into disfavor with the Powers That Be at the social media platform. If that’s the case, did they do so at the behest of federal officials?

“This is some Soviet-style bulls**t,” Bongino told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “I’ve known [about the shadow banning] this the whole time. I was called a conspiracy theorist and a whack job.” And it’s not just Twitter. Bongino’s website has been banned by Google Ads, and he was banned from YouTube for saying that cloth masks don’t work to stop the spread of Covid. “And now I find out I’m on a NSFW list,” he fumed. “Tell me again how we live in a free country!”

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk also experienced the wrath of Twitter’s overlords. He made the “Do Not Amplify” list as well as the NSFW list:


Kirk told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that his Twitter account was averaging 150,000 retweets a day, but all of a sudden, “we fell off a cliff.” Engagement was down 95%, he said.

“I was called a conspiracy theorist,” he explained. “They convince you to stop talking about it.”

He noted that Twitter was treating his account “with more scrutiny and censorship” than Iran and other state sponsors of terror.

Weiss pointed out that “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.'”

“What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF.’ Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning,” Weiss explained. One Twitter employee said, “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.”

The platform used VF to “block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from...



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