(Republicaninformer.com)- Last Friday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi released the first round of “The Twitter Files,” which featured the internal documents related to Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post’s October 2020 report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
While the documents presented in the release didn’t specifically say the censorship of the story was done at the government’s request, Taibbi mentions that Twitter execs recalled receiving a general warning from Federal law enforcement about possible foreign hacks.
In responding to Taibbi’s thread, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk tweeted last Friday night that if Twitter acted alone in suppressing free speech, it would not be a violation of the First Amendment. However, if Twitter was “acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review,” then it is a violation of the First Amendment.
Whether Twitter did engage in censorship at the behest of the government has yet to be established in the Twitter Files material as yet.
But there is far more to come.
Round two of the “Twitter Files” was released by independent journalist Bari Weiss on Thursday night.
In the second installment, Weiss tackles Twitter’s secret practice of “blacklisting” conservatives, the practice commonly referred to as “shadowbanning.”
Twitter executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, long denied that the platform engaged in the shadowbanning of conservative accounts. But from the documents released by Weiss, it appears their denials were lies.
In her Twitter thread, Weiss featured screen captures showing some of the conservative Twitter accounts that were placed on this secret blacklist, including conservative talk radio host Dan Bongino, Libs of TikTok, and anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University.
According to Weiss, Twitter employees built blacklists that prevent “disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users.”
More installments of the Twitter Files will be released in the coming weeks.
