A second “Twitter files” exposé on Thursday revealed the social media company blacklisted a Stanford medical expert who criticized Covid restrictions.
The Free Press reporter Bari Weiss tweeted a “Twitter files part two” thread revealing what many suspected all along – that conservative voices were being suppressed on the social media platform.
She said it was censorship of dissent against the Covid narrative, even if those dissenting critiques came from medical experts.
“Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending,” Weiss tweeted.
“Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added: ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,'” Weiss continued.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine, says he thinks the Biden administration was directing Twitter’s censorship against him.
“If that is actually the case … that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the first amendment, and Americans should be outraged,” he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
“We needed to have a discussion – an open scientific discussion – about the right policies for COVID,” Bhattacharya said.
“Imagine how different if all the small business had stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t have been depressed and suicidal, and all the learning loss that could have been avoided, if we just had an open scientific discussion.”
“This was not a free and fair kind of discussion. It wasn’t science that happened,” he continued.
Weiss revealed that some right-wing pundits were blacklisted on Twitter from being searched by name or having the chance to view viral tweets. For example, podcaster Dan Bongino was once hidden from the Twitter search engine, while Charlie Kirk was subject to a “do not amplify” account setting.
It’s unclear which other accounts, if any, had restrictive measures placed on them.
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk has promised to reveal all and to provide full transparency regarding what happened under the former Twitter staff.
