Every Time Twitter Execs Lied To Our Faces About Shadowbanning
FederalistDec 09, 2022
Journalist Bari Weiss on Friday claimed internal company documents showed Twitter practiced different methods of censorship before Elon Musk bought the platform in October. She said that it created "secret" blacklists to limit users and restricted the visibility of "disfavored tweets" and certain right-leaning accounts.
This comes after Weiss, a former opinion editor at The New York Times who now runs The Free Press, was given access, along with fellow independent journalist Matt Taibbi, to a trove of company documents by Musk.
The old Twitter regime never thought someone would buy them out, let alone release their inner workings, which is why they repeatedly lied to the American people about politically-motivated shadow banning. They banned prestigious doctors from speaking about COVID, Libs of TikTok from freely exposing disturbing "gender-affirming care" for children, and conservative viewpoints in general. Entire swaths of the American political arena were wrongly silenced.
These "Twitter Drops" are embarrassing nothingburgers. Twitter's use of different methods of sanctions is not a violation of the First Amendment, which applies only to state actors. US Federal courts have ruled time and again, and as recently as 2020, that social media platforms are not state actors. What Weiss described is simply... content moderation.