• Elon Musk has been releasing a series of documents he has uncovered at Twitter via select journalists.
• The latest batch of files reveals that despite saying otherwise, Twitter was indeed shadow banning accounts.
• These accounts included the likes of Libs of TikTok and Charlie Kirk.

Over the last week Elon Musk has been trying to showcase just how bad things were at Twitter with the so-called Twitter Files.

These “files” are being handed to a select group of journalists who appear to have access to parts of Twitter only employees can see.

The first part of these files revealed that Twitter didn’t know how to deal with the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in 2020. The files riled up Musk’s fans but for most, what was seen was confusion from a team trying to handle a breaking news story while abiding by its own rules.

Now, Bari Weiss has penned a thread – as this is the only acceptable way to reveal this information – in which she outlines how Twitter shadow-banned certain accounts.

THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

These accounts included Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk.

According to Weiss, this limiting of the reach of these accounts is contrary to Twitter’s claims that it does not shadow-ban or limit the reach of accounts. One Twitter engineer allegedly told Weiss, “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.”

The team who ultimately made these decisions was referred to internally as the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support or SIP-PES. This team included the likes of head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, head of trust and safety Yoel Roth as well as former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.

One of the accounts which drew a large amount of scrutiny from this team was Libs of TikTok. The smoking gun, according to Weiss, is that this account was shadowbanned despite not explicitly violative content being found.

However, an excerpt of a report tweet by Weiss reads, “Since its most recent timeout, while LTT [Libs of TikTok] has not directly engaged in behaviour violate of the Hateful Conduct Policy, the user has continued targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community for alleged misconduct.”

While Twitter is now revealing that shadowbans were in fact in place, it’s rather odd to see the cheers from users with Twitter Blue in the wings. With Twitter Blue, Musk has proposed that users who don’t pay the platform $8 will have replies, mentions and other activities on the site limited. This is because only a bot wouldn’t pay for Twitter Blue, right?

While we agree that Twitter shadow-banning accounts in secret is bad, the solution to this being Twitter Blue so that an account’s reach can be amplified isn’t much better.

We await the next set of Twitter Files with mild interest.