The Twitter Files Parts 1-2: shadow banning, story suppression, interference & more

The recording opens mid-banter, with the hosts trading jokes about who looks bloated and comparing each other's faces to Bert and Ernie. There is no substantive argument here, only the usual teasing before the show starts.

One host pauses to get a drink and asks the others for a recommendation. He says he has been working on his weight, settles on a mocha latte, and is told that a double mocha is a win. The exchange is pure filler.

One host asks another whether he has invested in a product, and the reply is that he has not yet but offers a promo code. A speaker then jokes that the product has been part of his weight-loss journey and of a supposed alliance with another host, creating a unified voting block for All-In Summit 2023 and giving him two solid votes. The details of the product are garbled in the transcript.

The bit then turns into a mock negotiation. One host says he would back a credible plan that keeps the event's integrity, others insist they were joking, and he demands that the two others come up with a plan together. His price is stated in dollars: he would do it if each could make 4,000,000 net.

A speaker jokes that another is writing the figure down as if it were a contract, and the reply is that the contract is signed. The line that follows is that for Jay Kal the negotiation begins once a signed contract exists. The rest of the exchange is too fragmentary to summarize reliably.

The formal opening begins. A host says the four of them are still going after 107 episodes, claims the show is better than ever, and notes that the previous week it ranked number 12, adding a jab at mainstream media and a hope of reaching the top 10. These are the host's own remarks about the show's ranking.

The hosts announce the topic, the Twitter files, part 1. A joke follows about oppressive working conditions: a host says that if he were paid five bucks for the show he would be on strike, and another replies that they are not only paid five bucks but also billed for the production.

A host remarks on what he calls the irony of reporters who wrote about the oppressive conditions Elon Musk was supposedly creating at Twitter, which in his telling amounted to wanting employees to return to the office and work hard, with a generous three-month severance package for those who did not. He says those same reporters are now on strike at their own employer, which he describes as running a clickbait farm. This is the host's characterization, not something the discussion establishes.

He then poses a hypothetical: if the publisher of The New York Times offered anyone unhappy a voluntary three-month severance, with a choice between working hard and taking the money, he predicts that 800 of 1200 people would take it. The number is his guess, and another speaker agrees.

The host moderating says the Twitter files have dropped. He describes the first release as given to Matt Taibbi, whom he calls a left-leaning journalist who worked at Rolling Stone and did what he considers the best coverage of the financial crisis, holding that group to account.

He says the second release went to Barry Weiss, described as a right-leaning independent journalist who previously worked at the New York Times. He suggests the group go through the material in reverse, starting with the drop from the night before, and the others agree.

Giving what he calls a basic summary, the host says there is now confirmation of what the right suspected all along: a secret silencing system built into the software, with a blacklist that tagged right-wing conservative voices. His examples are Dan Bongino, described as a former secret service agent turned conservative radio and podcast host, who was tagged as being on a search blacklist and so was not allowed to be found in search.

He adds that Charlie Kirk, a conservative commentator, was tagged do not amplify, which he interprets as meaning he could not trend into people's feeds even where they followed him. He also names a Stanford professor, Jay Bhattacharya, as blacklisted from trends, and another speaker confirms the pronunciation. The host's reading of what each tag meant is his own interpretation of the released material.

The host says Bhattacharya was blacklisted because of a dissenting opinion on COVID that, in his words, has turned out to be true, which is the host's own judgment. He argues the danger lies in the lack of transparency: actions were taken covertly by people inside Twitter, mostly against one side, with nobody owning them. Those affected were never told and could still see their own tweets, but not be seen even by their own fans.

The moderator asks the host addressed as Sacks whether shadow banning, meaning taking part in a community without being seen, could ever be a justifiable tool, and what he makes of the revelations. The host replies that he wants to boil it down, and calls it an FTX-level fraud, except that what was stolen was not customer funds but free speech rights, including the public's right to hear people as they expected.

He says Twitter executives, among them Jack Dorsey, repeatedly stated that they did not shadow ban, and specifically not on the basis of political viewpoint. In his view the files show that this is exactly what they did, and he likens it to SPF using FTX customer funds as a personal piggy bank. The comparison and the characterization of intent are his own claims.

He extends the analogy by saying the executives treated Twitter as a personal ideological piggy bank, using content moderation tools to put a thumb on the scale of American democracy and suppress views they disliked, even when they could not justify removal under their own rules.

As evidence, the host cites Slack conversations exposed by Barry Weiss in which staff admit they cannot suppress Libs of TikTok under the policy because the account has not violated it, but will suppress it anyway. This is his reading of the exchange as reported.

A host then explains what Libs of TikTok does: it finds people who are trans, or perhaps not LGBTQ, features their TikToks and mocks them on Twitter. He says this is certainly free speech. The safety team's argument, as he relays it, was that by collecting such posts together the account was inciting violence against those people, and that no individual rule was broken but collectively the account could in some way target them.

He asks Friedberg whether there is anything fair in that statement, adding that he is posing the question for discussion and is not giving his own view. The source gives no answer from Friedberg at this point.

The conversation dissolves into interruptions. Sacks wants to finish his point, and the moderator says he has already spoken for two minutes and wants to hear from Friedberg first. The hosts bicker over who gets to speak and for how long, with one saying he gets interrupted and another granting him two minutes.

Sacks asks to finish his SBF analogy first, and a host jokes that the filibuster continues and tells him to go ahead. The exchange is mostly procedural and carries no new argument.