As the second round of Twitter Files were released on Thursday, it was revealed that the social media giant had actively blacklisted conservative commentators Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino.
With the second round of Twitter Files came revelations that the social media giant had actively blacklisted conservative commentators Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino.
The two prominent right-wing voices were joined by many others, including Libs of TikTok and lockdown skeptic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, in being prevented from engaging with users to their full potential.
Taking over for Matt Taibbi, independent journalist Bari Weiss revealed that Bongino had been hit with a "Search Blacklist" tag, effectively making him invisible despite having zero strikes.
Kirk, who had one strike at the time, received a "Do Not Amplify" tag.
The second round of Twitter Files centred around "secret blacklists" compiled by teams of employees to "prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics."
Weiss pointed out that this was all done in secret, without the users' knowledge.
Kirk spoke with FOX News' Tucker Carlson to discuss the news, suggesting that he could "probably guess" which tweets set the censors at Twitter into a frenzy.
He explained that after sharing posts cautioning about the potential impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns, he saw his engagement drop off a cliff.
"I started to talk about this a lot," he said, "and I was called a conspiracy theorist; I was smeared."
Citing the number of tags his account was hit with, Kirk pointed out that Twitter was treating him "with more scrutiny and censorship than the [Supreme Leader] of Iran, than Hamas, than people that do actual terroristic type damage."
Kirk pointed out that his engagement had decreased "95 percent," suggesting that Twitter saw what he said as "a direct threat to the regime." He went on to question whether Twitter had acted at the behest of Dr. Fauci and the federal government.
He accused Twitter of changing from a social media platform to a "Democrat Super PAC" at the onset of the pandemic, noting that it became impossible to reach anyone at the company regarding potential suppression of his account.
"I don't think we'll ever measure the impact of what Twitter did to our voices online in the calendar year of 2020," Kirk concluded.
"In 2018, I met with Jack Dorsey," Kirk later tweeted. "He assured me Twitter did not "shadow ban" accounts. Either he lied or these policies didn't take effect until later, which is plausible based on what happened next."
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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