The Propaganda FilesTaibbi reported that Stanford's Virality Project flagged COVID vaccine content to six major platforms, including 'stories of true vaccine side effects' it said could fuel hesitancy. The project's leaders say they mostly published public briefings, platforms decided independently, and nothing was demanded.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified to the House Judiciary weaponization subcommittee that the Twitter Files showed federal agencies pressing platforms to restrict speech under both Trump and Biden. Democrats questioned their credibility and their ties to Musk. Neither side's case was settled in court.
Vijaya Gadde, James Baker and Yoel Roth testified to the House Oversight Committee about the 2020 laptop decision. They said it was a mistake but denied government direction. Whistleblower Anika Collier Navaroli testified the Trump White House had asked Twitter to remove a Chrissy Teigen tweet.
Taibbi reported that Twitter staff had found the Hamilton 68 dashboard's roughly 600 'Russian influence' accounts were mostly ordinary Americans, Canadians and Britons. News outlets had widely cited the dashboard as tracking Russian bots. The group behind it says it never called the accounts bots or Russian.
David Zweig reported that both the Trump and Biden administrations pressed Twitter on COVID content, and that Twitter labeled or removed some posts by credentialed experts that were opinion or accurate data. Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff's tweet was labeled 'Misleading.'
Michael Shellenberger reported that in 2020 the FBI repeatedly warned Twitter of possible Russian hack-and-leak operations, while it had held Hunter Biden's laptop since December 2019. Yoel Roth joined an Aspen Institute exercise on a hypothetical Hunter Biden hack-and-dump. When the Post story ran, Roth's first reaction was that it looked like a leak operation.
A Twitter email released in Shellenberger's Part 7 thread said Twitter had collected $3,415,323 from the FBI since October 2019. Elon Musk called it payment to censor. The record shows statutory reimbursement for processing legal requests for user data, not for moderation.
Taibbi documented a steady flow of FBI reports to Twitter flagging accounts for alleged election misinformation, some of them obvious satire with few followers. Twitter often acted on them. The FBI said it flagged possible violations but never directed action.
Twitter suspended several journalists who cover Elon Musk, days after banning the @ElonJet account that tracked his plane. Musk said they had shared his real-time location. Press-freedom groups called it retaliatory.
Three threads by Taibbi, Shellenberger and Weiss traced Twitter's path to permanently suspending President Trump on January 8, 2021. Staff first found his final tweets did not break the rules; senior executives and employee pressure moved the decision. Twitter cited 'the risk of further incitement of violence.'
Bari Weiss's thread showed Twitter used 'visibility filtering' to limit the reach of specific accounts without telling them. Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya was on a 'Trends Blacklist,' Dan Bongino on a 'Search Blacklist,' and Charlie Kirk was set to 'Do Not Amplify.' A senior group called SIP-PES handled the most sensitive cases.
The second Twitter Files thread showed the Libs of TikTok account was on Twitter's 'Trends Blacklist' and tagged so staff could not act on it without the SIP-PES group. It was suspended six times in 2022. An internal memo said it had not directly broken the hateful conduct policy.
Matt Taibbi's first Twitter Files thread, released with Elon Musk's approval, showed internal debate over the 2020 block of the NY Post laptop story. It showed staff doubting the hacked-materials rationale and a list of tweets flagged by the 'Biden team' marked 'Handled.' Taibbi said he saw no evidence of government involvement in the laptop decision.
Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter and removed its top executives, including Vijaya Gadde. He reinstated banned accounts and opened internal files to journalists. His new policy openly limited the reach of some tweets, which critics compared to shadowbanning.
Twitter locked the satire site the Babylon Bee out of its account for naming transgender health official Rachel Levine its 'Man of the Year.' The Bee refused to delete the tweet and stayed locked out for months. Elon Musk restored the account on November 18, 2022.
In October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter blocked links to the New York Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop under its hacked-materials policy. Within about 24 hours it reversed course and changed the policy. Jack Dorsey later told the Senate the decision was wrong.
On Joe Rogan Experience #1258, Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answered Tim Pool's charges that Twitter's rules hit conservatives harder. Gadde said Twitter polices behavior, not ideology, and both admitted enforcement mistakes. Internal files released in 2022 showed tools for limiting reach that were not disclosed to users at the time.
In 2018 Twitter's leadership publicly denied shadowbanning, in a company blog post, a radio interview and testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dorsey also told the committee an algorithm had unfairly filtered about 600,000 accounts from search auto-suggest. Internal documents released in 2022 showed Twitter used visibility-limiting tools it did not call shadowbanning.
