With the second round of Twitter Files came revelations that the social media giant had suspended Libs of TikTok despite acknowledging that the popular account had not violated any policies.
While other notable figures were blacklisted via a number of internal tags, Twitter took things one step further with Libs of TikTok, flagging the account with a big red label that read, "DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH SIP-PES."
Taking over for Matt Taibbi, independent journalist Bari Weiss explained that SIP-PES referred to "Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support," a "secret group" that included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, among others.
"This," Weiss revealed, "is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made."
Libs of TikTok received six suspensions in 2022 alone, each of which rendered her unable to post for as long as one week.
While Libs of TikTok had been told at the time that she had been suspended for violating Twitter's "hateful conduct" policy, internal SIP-PES documents explicitly stated that she "has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy."
The group called for Libs of TikTok to receive a "timeout" for "indirectly violating" the policy by "targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community," adding that they hadn't found any "explicitly violative Tweets" to warrant a permanent suspension.
Weiss contrasted this to the response Libs of TikTok received when she was doxxed by Taylor Lorenz. In that case, Twitter did nothing, and the tweet is still up.
"All I can keep thinking is that I must be doing something right for them to go to these great lengths to censor me," Libs of TikTok said following the revelations. "I promise you, I will never stop."
She later joined FOX News' Tucker Carlson to discuss the matter further.
"You must have had some sense that you were being censored in ways they weren't telling you," Carlson asked. "Did you sense this was happening?"
Libs of TikTok replied that she "absolutely" felt that something was going on behind the scenes, especially when her popular tweets never seemed to appear on Twitter's trending section.
"There were sometimes days or weeks at a time where I felt like my tweets were getting much less engagement than usual, than they should," she continued, "and I think now it's clear that there was suppression and there was shadow-banning."
Carlson pointed out that the most absurd part of the whole situation was that the vast majority of Libs of TikTok's content was authentic, previously reported material with very little added commentary.
She suggested that those in power did not want such material to be brought to the masses because it "makes them look bad" and won't "stand up to scrutiny."
"I was suspended for probably a month altogether for what? For not even violating their policies."
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