A social media firestorm erupted after the so-called “Twitter files” revealed widespread censorship and discrimination among Twitter employees and executives.
In a lengthy thread, journalist Bari Weiss explained how Twitter employees systematically worked to keep certain accounts from being seen by the public. “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,” she wrote. “Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a ‘Search Blacklist.’ Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to ‘Do Not Amplify.'”
She continued, “What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF.’ Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.” But what is visibility filtering?
“‘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,” Weiss continued. “‘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.”
This is all done without users ever knowing it is happening.
Another group of Twitter employees, called “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” and known as “SIP-PES,” controlled larger, more influential accounts, like Libs of TikTok. “But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that ‘LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy,'” Weiss said. Yet when information doxxing the founder of the account was posted on Twitter, employees refused to take action.
“When [Chaya] Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: ‘We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules,'” Weiss reported. “No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.”
Though Weiss’s reporting largely focused on censorship of conservatives, Twitter frequently censored pro-life accounts — including Live Action’s.
When Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, resigned, he left behind a legacy of discrimination against the pro-life movement on a regular basis. Even relatively benign tweets, such as an Irish bishop‘s belief that assisted suicide is harmful, were subject to censorship. Additionally, ableist abuse was allowed to proliferate against children with disabilities, while actual photos of children with disabilities were covered and labeled as “sensitive content,” as if the mere appearance of a child with a disability was offensive.
Live Action has itself faced discrimination on Twitter for years, as the platform banned both the organization and its founder, Lila Rose, from buying ads on Twitter. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, has been able to promote its abortion business freely. E-mail exchanges showed that Twitter refused to allow Live Action advertising unless the group’s Twitter accounts — as well as Live Action’s own website — was stripped of all pro-life content, including ultrasound photos and information regarding Live Action’s investigations — many of which exposed the crimes and misdeeds committed by Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry at large.
The Twitter files prove that this censorship — which Dorsey previously denied — is real. The question is, with new leadership in place, will the pro-life movement finally be allowed to spread its message freely without interference from those allied with the abortion industry, who want the pro-life message to remain suppressed.
