‘Inmates were running the asylum’: Musk confirms right-wing accounts were suspended without cause

Elon Musk on Thursday evening confirmed that conservatives were banned from Twitter despite not violating any policies, as the latest installment of the Twitter Files showed the scale of censorship and ‘visibility filtering’ on the social media platform.

Musk, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, vowed to end the practice of ‘shadow banning’ – secretly downgrading a person’s tweets or trending themes, to minimize their reach.

‘Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadow banned, the reason why and how to appeal,’ he said.

Musk, 51, singled out Yoel Roth, the global head of trust and safety, who wrote in internal messages that he wanted more creative ways of censoring and muffling specific accounts and content.

‘Former head of censorship at Twitter was perhaps not entirely unbiased,’ Musk said, accompanied by a screenshot of a 2017 tweet in which Roth said there were ‘actual Nazis in the White House’.

Musk defended Twitter’s founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, however.

‘Controversial decisions were often made without getting Jack’s approval and he was unaware of systemic bias. The inmates were running the asylum,’ he said on Thursday night.

‘Jack has a pure heart imo.’

The ‘Chief Twit’, as he calls himself, was responding to revelations from journalist Bari Weiss that Twitter kept a ‘secret blacklist’ of topics and accounts to prevent them from trending.

The accounts of conservative commentators were deliberately made less prominent in what one called ‘Soviet-style bulls***’, while another said he was treated ‘with more censorship than Hamas.’

Weiss revealed how Twitter had specialist teams tasked with dealing with 200 cases a day. 

Those who questioned the prevailing COVID orthodoxy of lockdowns and mask mandates, such as Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that lockdowns harmed children, were also placed on a ‘search blacklist’.

In October 2020, journalist Dave Rubin asked then-CEO Jack Dorsey: ‘Do you shadowban based on political beliefs? Simple yes or no will do.’

Dorsey replied: ‘No.’ 

Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust, also denied that Twitter operated such blacklists.

‘We do not shadow ban,’ she said in 2018, according to Weiss – speaking alongside Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product. 

They added: ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.’ 

Weiss made the revelations on Thursday in the second tranche of what has been termed The Twitter Files. 

She reported that Twitter used what was termed ‘visibility filtering’ to downplay accounts they objected to, and had teams of people working to reduce the traction gained by individuals or their tweets. 

One senior Twitter insider called it ‘a very powerful tool’.

The teams working to minimize certain accounts or topics were backed up by a top-level ‘Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support’ team – where the CEO and top legal advisors would decide sensitive cases of censorship. Jack Dorsey and his successor as CEO, Parag Agrawal, were on the team. 

Musk was gleeful about the revelations regarding the company he now owns – retweeting Weiss’ thread, with a popcorn emoji.

‘As @bariweiss clearly describes, the rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left,’ he said.

He added: ‘Truth brings reconciliation.’ 

Within Twitter, the practice was termed ‘visibility filtering’, Weiss reported.

‘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 her. 

Twitter would block searches of individual users, make a specific tweet less easy to find, block posts from the ‘trending’ page, and remove them from hashtag searches. 

Another source, a Twitter engineer, 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.’ 

Weiss said that the matter was dealt with by Twitter’s Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, known as SRT-GET – a group that handled 200 cases a day.

A higher-level team, known as SIP-PES, ‘Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,’ dealt with more complex and high-profile cases.

Dorsey and his replacement as CEO, Parag Agrawal, sat on the group, as did Gadde and Yoel Roth, the global head of trust and safety.

Roth messaged colleagues on Slack to say that ‘spam enforcements’ had been used as a way of circumventing the safety team ‘under-enforcing their policies’. 

The group would need to intervene if any action was taken to limit the popular account @LibsofTiktok – whose account was tabbed internally: ‘Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.’ 

Weiss said that account was suspended six times in 2022, and the author, Chaya Raichik, was blocked from her account for at least a week each time. 

Her account was suspended, they told Raichik, due to violations of Twitter’s ‘hateful conduct’ policy – but internally, Twitter admitted there was no violation.

In an October 2022 memo from SIP-PES obtained by Weiss, the committee concluded that the account ‘has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.’ 

They justified the suspension by saying her posts encouraged online harassment of ‘hospitals and medical providers’ by insinuating ‘that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.’ 

Weiss said that their response was in sharp contrast to that when Raichik was doxxed, with her home address published online. Raichik complained, but Twitter refused to take the tweet down, and it remains on the site to this day. 

Raichik tweeted: ‘They suspended me multiple times knowing I never violated any policies. This is what happens when you talk about things that they don’t want you to talk about. So glad those days on Twitter are over. Thank you @elonmusk.’

Musk replied: ‘You’re welcome. Twitter won’t be perfect in the future, but it will be *much* better.’

Weiss also singled out Roth for criticism, saying he was active in censoring accounts.

She noted that he had written to an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team wanting to improve ‘non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.’ 

Roth wrote: ‘The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.’ 

He said that Dorsey was supportive of the censorship.

‘We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains,’ Roth wrote.

Tucker Carlson, Fox News host, immediately seized on Weiss’ report, saying it ‘confirms what many suspected but none knew for certain – which is that Twitter routinely censored prominent critics of the Biden administration, with no factual justification whatsoever.’

He noted the example of the Stanford doctor who was vocal against COVID lockdowns and was blacklisted, saying it was ‘doubtless at the request of the authorities’.

Carlson continued: ‘They prevented his tweets from trending which meant most of his tweets couldn’t be seen. 

‘According to Weiss, at one point they slapped him with a search ban. That made it impossible for users to find tweets by him, because they were inaccurate? 

‘No, because they were accurate. That was the crime. That’s always the crime. They never punish you for lying, they only punish you for telling the truth.’

He added: ‘It was strategic. They weren’t censoring people because they were annoying, they were censoring people because they were providing factual information that might have stopped certain policies or election results from happening. 

‘So, you know, this was sophisticated – and had an effect on American society, I would say.’

Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk told Carlson on Thursday night that the report confirmed his long-held suspicions, but said he was angry. 

‘They’re treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the prime minister of Iran, than Hamas, than people who do actual terroristic type damage,’ said Charlie Kirk, who was tabbed ‘do not amplify’ in internal tagging.

‘Now we [have] evidence to show that’s exactly why my Twitter account the last couple of years has been down 95 percent in engagement.’

Fox News commentator Dan Bongino, whose account was put on a ‘search blacklist’, said it was ‘Soviet-style bulls***.’

He says he was averaging 115,000 retweets a day at their peak – questioning COVID lockdowns, for example.

‘I was called a conspiracy theorist, I was smeared,’ Kirk told Carlson, adding that he complained and met Dorsey personally. Dorsey assured him that shadow banning was not happening.

Kirk said the social media company was censoring him because ‘they saw what I had to say as a direct threat to the regime.’

He said: ‘They’re treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the prime minister of Iran, than Hamas, than people who do actual terroristic type damage. 

‘Now we [have] evidence to show that’s exactly why my Twitter account the last couple [of]years has been down 95 percent in engagement.

‘Were they told to do this by the federal government?’ he asked, describing how he watched the Twitter change from a social media platform into a ‘Democrat super PAC.’

He added: ‘Apparently asking questions about the lockdown policy was a threat. Were they told to do this by Anthony Fauci, by the federal government?

‘We may never know – but Twitter at its best was a place where heterodox ideas were able to spread. Twitter went out of its way to censor it and suffocate our account.’ 

He said: ‘I’ve been told forever, so weird that I can’t find you on Twitter, you’re a verified account, your name’s not usual, how come you don’t come up?

‘When I spoke about this on my show I was called a conspiracy theorist and a wacko. 

‘My website has been banned by Google Ads; I was banned by YouTube for suggesting that cloth masks don’t work, which is now scientifically proven.

‘Now I find I am on a ‘not safe for work’ shadow ban list on Twitter, because I’ve committed the thought crime of being a conservative.’ 

He added: ‘Tell me again how we live in a free country.’ 

Raichik, the @LibsOfTikTok founder, told Carlson by phone that she ‘absolutely sensed I was being censored.’ 

‘I had a very large account. I never was able to trend, and now we find out I was on the trend blacklist. 

‘There were sometimes days or weeks at a time where I felt like my tweets were getting much less engagement than usual, than they should. 

‘Now it’s clear that there was suppression and shadow banning.’

Raichik added: ‘The craziest part of this whole thing is, that they admitted, that I’m not even violating the policies, and they still suspended me seven times. Seven times, three of which were for a week at a time. 

‘So I was suspended for probably a month altogether – and for what? 

‘Not even violating their policies – just because they don’t like their own views. They don’t want you to see it.’

The first tranche of documents, posted by Matt Taibbi last week, detailed how Twitter in October 2020 decided to censor the New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden‘s laptop. 

They feared the contents were obtained through hacking, but had no evidence to prove it, and it quickly emerged that the laptop had simply been left at a repair store.

Dorsey, the then-CEO of Twitter, admitted that censoring legitimate reporting was a significant error.   

The second tranche was delayed after Musk fired James Baker – Twitter’s general counsel and former FBI general counsel – after discovering he vetted the first installment of the Files, which were sent Taibbi, from Substack, and Common Sense Editor Weiss.  

Musk on Wednesday claimed the ‘most important’ Twitter data was ‘deleted’ and ‘hidden’ from the Dorsey.  

He vowed that ‘everything we find will be released’ as his newly acquired company continues to release the Twitter Files. 

Dorsey replied to Musk’s tweet about delays in releasing the second batch of Twitter Files, and called for the new CEO to ‘release everything’ at once. 

‘If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions?’ Dorsey wrote. 

‘Make everything public now.’ 

Musk replied that everything would be released, but even the ‘most important data was hidden (from [Dorsey] too) and some may have been deleted.’ 

Musk fired Baker ‘in light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue.’ 

Taibbi revealed that Baker’s involvement in the first batch of files was ‘without knowledge of new management.’ 

‘The process for producing the ‘Twitter Files’ involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated,’ Taibbi wrote on Twitter. 

‘Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss 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.’

Weiss said her ‘jaw hit the floor’ when she found out. 

The first batch of files the two journalists received was titled the Spectra Baker Emails. 

The first batch of internal documents showed Baker and other executives discussing Twitter’s October 2020 ban on a news report about Hunter’s foreign business deals, based on emails from his abandoned laptop.

On Friday, Taibbi published the batch of internal documents, calling them the ‘Twitter Files,’ which included an exchange between Baker and former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman.

Borrman asks, regarding banning an article about Hunter Biden under Twitter’s ‘hacked materials’ policy: ‘Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?’

Baker responded, appearing to argue in favor of maintaining the ban, because ‘caution is warranted.’ 

At the time, the files were determined to have broken Twitter’s hacked materials policy, but Dorsey has since said the call was a mistake. 

Critics accused Twitter of swaying the presidential election toward Biden by covering up the data.