News/Commentary

‘Jack has a pure heart… inmates were running the asylum’: Musk reacts to Twitter ‘blacklists’

December 9, 2022 | | Print Article

Twitter owner Elon Musk released the second part of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening, and with its release came a bevy of new bombshell revelations, the largest one being that “[t]he inmates were running the asylum.”

Which is to say that the social media platform was being run by censorious leftists who had no qualms about arbitrarily shadow-banning or outright banning conservatives based on questionable rules that were unevenly enforced.

However, former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey was not necessarily part of this madness, according to Musk, who suggested in a tweet that this ideologically driven censorship was driven by lower-level employees who’d purposefully kept Dorsey out of the loop:

Employees like Yoel Roth, the former global head of trust and safety, and Vijaya Gadde, the former head of legal, policy, and trust.

The pair worked with other employees to “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,” according to journalist Bari Weiss.

Weiss was the journalist chosen to release the second batch of the “Twitter Files.”

In a tweet, Musk suggested that Roth’s censorious behavior wasn’t necessarily all that surprising given his history as a histrionic leftist.

As an example, the Twitter CEO shared screenshots of hyperventilating tweets Roth had posted in 2017 in which he’d essentially accused the then-Trump administration of being stockpiled with “actual Nazis.”

FYI, there were no “Nazis” in the Trump administration.

While the censorious behavior was predictable, it was also contradictory to what employees like Gadde had claimed publicly.

“We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,” Gadde reportedly said in 2018.

But that was clearly a lie.

However, she and other employees seemed to justify their censorious behavior by referring to it as something else: “visibility filtering.”

“What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF,'” Weiss explained in a tweet.

But while its official name may have been different, the core tenets were the same:

Note the key words at the bottom: “All without users’ knowledge.”

Musk is hoping to rectify this abuse by tweaking Twitter’s software code to make it so that users can see their “true account status” at any time.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he tweeted late Thursday.

One of the victims of Twitter’s censorship was Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the famous “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account.

Weiss reported that Raichik was repeatedly suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct” despite her Twitter content not actually violating the rules.

Conversely, when Raichik reported a leftist user for publishing her address (called doxxing) to the platform, the leftist wasn’t penalized, let alone suspended.

Republished with permission from American Wire News Service

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Vivek Saxena
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