Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
The Twitter Files series has, if nothing else, given some level of vindication to users who have been targeted by the social media giant’s murky and often uneven content moderation team.
Chaya Raichik, whose LibsofTikTok account on Twitter is a favorite among conservative circles and the frequent target of anger from the left, has been on something of a victory lap since independent journalist Bari Weiss revealed last week the depths to which Twitter’s blacklisting plumbed.
Weiss reported that many users, Raichik perhaps most of all, were banned or otherwise muted on the site even when they hadn’t technically broken any Twitter rules. Indeed, Raichik was famously banned for “indirectly” running afoul of team Twitter.
“The craziest part of this whole thing is that they admitted I’m not even violating policy, and they still suspended me seven times,” Raichik said during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. “Three of which were for a week at a time.
“So I was suspended for probably a month altogether, and for what? For not even violating their policy.”
Raichik has also been active on Twitter. Thursday, she took a short break from her normal practice of sharing publicly available TikToks from far-left-leaning users to share a four-year-old video of then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that the company did not censor conservatives.
Throwback to 2018. Jack Dorsey to Sean Hannity: “we do not shadowban according to political ideology or viewpoint” pic.twitter.com/Jlmw0ZRBsg
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 9, 2022
In the video, which was captured in 2018, Dorsey tells Hannity Twitter does not “shadowban according to political ideology or viewpoint” but does “rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant.”
As reported by the Post Millennial, Dorsey has faced a wall of criticism following the Weiss report as numerous individuals have lined up to accuse him of misleading the public.
The concept of shadow banning, Twitter employees referred to it as visibility filtering, involves making a user’s content less visible to the rest of the platform in a way that people (the user and others) are unlikely to notice.
“Oh see… it wasn’t ‘shadow banning’ because they called it ‘visibility filtering,’ even though it was the exact same thing,” media personality Tim Young wrote in a tweet in which he tagged Dorsey.
Oh see… it wasn't "shadow banning" because they called it "visibility filtering," even though it was the exact same thing.
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) December 9, 2022
Raichik has also reserved some venom for her critics, and those of Weiss.
“‘Everything Bari Weiss is tweeting about is already known’ – the people who called us conspiracy theorists for suggesting Twitter favors Liberals and suppresses Conservatives,” Raichik tweeted late last week.