[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] - Journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been handed a trove of documents from Twitter, detailing why they censored the story of Hunter Biden's laptop
- Taibbi released the first tranche of the documents on Friday, and Weiss on Thursday followed up with a second series
- Weiss revealed that conservatives and lockdown skeptics were deliberately down-ranked by Twitter, to stop their accounts gaining prominence
- Among those blacklisted were Fox News regular Dan Bongino and youth activist Charlie Kirk, plus Stanford CDC critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya
- Jack Dorsey and his head of legal, Vijaya Gadde, both denied that Twitter ever deliberately downgraded or 'shadow banned' any accounts
- The documents from Taibbi showed panic among senior Twitter staff in October 2020 when The New Post reported on the contents of Hunter's computer
Twitter kept a 'secret blacklist' of topics and accounts to prevent them from trending, according to data obtained by journalist Bari Weiss - with up to 200 'cases' being dealt with a day by a special division within the company.
Conservative commentators such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk were deliberately put on a 'search blacklist' - in the case of Bongino - or tabbed 'do not amplify', in the case of Kirk.
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.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, was gleeful about the revelations regarding the company he now owns - retweeting Weiss' thread, with a popcorn emoji.
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.
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, 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.'
Tucker Carlson, Fox News host, immediately seized on the 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.'
The documents detail 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.
Jack Dorsey, the then-CEO of Twitter, admitted that censoring the legitimate reporting was a significant error.
Twitter's new owner and 'Chief Twit' Elon Musk on Wednesday claimed the 'most important' Twitter data was 'deleted' and 'hidden' from the Dorsey.
Musk, 51, has vowed that 'everything we find will be released' as his newly acquired company continues to release the Twitter Files.
On Wednesday, Dorsey, 46, replied to Musk's tweet about delaying the second batch of the Twitter Files, calling 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.' 
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