Over the weekend, while we dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was Bari Weiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”

Join: The Twitter Files

“My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss.

The first batch of files reporters received was marked, “Spectra Baker Emails.”

Join: The Twitter Files

Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.

Join: The Twitter Files

The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday.

Join: The Twitter Files

Reporters resumed searches through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today. The next installment of “The Twitter Files” will appear. Stay tuned.

Join: The Twitter Files

I realize there are other stories going on right now 👀 but this, by Aaron Sibarium, about the hijacking of pediatric medicine is very important and is affecting millions of American families.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-hijacking-of-pediatric-medicine

Join: The Twitter Files

THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.

Join: The Twitter Files

1. 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.

Join: The Twitter Files

2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.

Join: The Twitter Files

3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

Join: The Twitter Files

4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

Join: The Twitter Files

5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify.”

Join: The Twitter Files

6. 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.”

Join: The Twitter Files

7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

Join: The Twitter Files

8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.

Join: The Twitter Files

9. “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.

Join: The Twitter Files

10. All without users’ knowledge.

Join: The Twitter Files

11. “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.

Join: The Twitter Files

12. 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.

Join: The Twitter Files

13. 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.”

Join: The Twitter Files