I believe that Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter files is a huge service to humanity. Elon has often spoken about how much he loves humanity and is all too often mocked or ridiculed for it. However, it is this love for humanity that led him to purchase Twitter which, unfortunately, came with a lot of drama from his many, many critics.
In the first segment, released on December 2nd, Elon and the team revealed just how far former executives went to abuse their power. Matt Taibbi, who a dear friend of mine described as a personal hero to him, shared the first release.
Taibbi revealed that Twitter was literally deleting tweets if a political party or side asked them to. This included both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign. Although Biden was not yet president, Twitter honored more requests to delete tweets by the Biden campaign than it had the Trump campaign.
You can read Taibbi’s entire thread here. I thought it was disturbing how the mainstream media brushed it off as no big deal. And the White House, which is Biden’s White House now, said Twitter was doing “not healthy.”
Instead of covering the information that was presented, the mainstream media has either brushed it off or made more hit pieces against Elon Musk.
Today’s release of the Twitter files was given to Bari Weiss to release. And this is a doozy. I have been shadowbanned on Twitter before. I was even suspended when Elon Musk replied to me in 2020 when I asked about ventilators being sent to Louisiana. That day, I couldn’t even reply back to him, thanking him. I was immediately suspended following his response. No warning. No reason why. Fortunately, our state wound up not needing the extra ventilators.
It is a horrible feeling being silenced. It took several months for my account to be reinstated, and I had actually given up. Although I used a new account, I was invisible. Yet I was one of many silenced for interacting with and supporting Elon Musk.
In 2020, supporting Tesla was almost taboo, especially if you’re a writer or a journalist of any sort. Tesla had begun to experience its success and still had many extreme critics that would target Tesla supporters and abuse Twitter’s reporting system to get people banned. Too many Tesla supporters experienced this. Some were suspended. Some were only shadowbanned.
Shadowbanning was something Twitter vehemently denied doing yet, as Weiss revealed, seemed to revel in. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust, was a key player along with Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety.
Weiss revealed Twitter’s shadow banning, or “visibility filtering,” of several accounts. Along with the screenshots she provided, a few Twitter employees told her that, yes, they used VF, as it is called, to control user visibility. They would block searches of individual users, limit the reach of a certain tweet, block selected users’ posts from appearing on the trending page, and so on. And Twitter did this without its users’ knowledge.
Twitter even had a special team dedicated to VF: its Strategic Response Team-Glogal Escalation Team, which handed up to 200 cases daily. And that wasn’t even the highest level. That level was the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support made up of Gadde, Roth, and subsequent CEOs, among others.
This group made the most politically sensitive decisions. “Think high follower account, controversial,” a Twitter employee told Weiss. For those accounts, “there would be no ticket or anything.”
Although I am not that influential — I’m practically a nobody compared with the high-profile accounts that were affected — I didn’t get any warning or reason why my account was suspended. I think I got an email like a month or so later. It was well after the fact. If Twitter did this to regular people like me, imagine what they did to high-profile accounts that they deemed a threat for whatever reason.
Weiss also shared screenshots pertaining to the popular account, LibsOfTikTok, whose account owner was doxed. Twitter had no problem with her being doxxed — Elon Musk is now looking into why the tweet doxxing here was still up. However, it chose to since her. She was suspended six times in 2022 and was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
Another thing the screenshots revealed was that your direct messages on Twitter had no privacy — Twitter employees could read them. Elon Musk said that DMs should be encrypted so that it is impossible for anyone on Twitter to see the public’s messages like Signal and iMessage.
Then there's the child sexual exploitation that has been plaguing the platform. Twitter is finally making an effort to remove it thanks to Elon Musk’s listening to Eliza Bleu, a friend of mine who is an advocate.
It was Eliza who told me about John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, who were minors that were abused, recorded and their abusers uploaded that material to Twitter.
Twitter said that the videos of the two boys being raped didn’t violate its terms. Let that sink in.
It literally took the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help John Doe 1 and 2 have their abuse material removed. You can read more in their lawsuit here. The two are suing Twitter and began their lawsuit before Elon purchased the platform.
The release of these files and documents, to me, is a service to humanity by Elon Musk. Many will say, “This is old news,” or “We already knew that,” in hopes of diminishing the importance of the work this team is doing.
Don’t fall for it.
