There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.