Bari Weiss
@bariweiss
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Editor of The Free Press @thefp Host of Honestly @thehonestlypod Head of @nelliebowles fan club
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You Are the Last Line of Defense.
This is the speech I gave in the memory of Barbara K. Olson
@FedSoc
.
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THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
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THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART FIVE.
THE REMOVAL OF TRUMP FROM TWITTER.
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1. A new
#TwitterFiles
investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
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3. 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.
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6. 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.”
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5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (
@charliekirk11
) to “Do Not Amplify.”
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4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (
@dbongino
), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
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7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
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2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
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16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was
@libsoftiktok
—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
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8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
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11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
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9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
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14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
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22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.
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12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.
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19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:
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15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
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17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
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21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
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20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
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13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”
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29. We're just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we'd love to hear from you. Please write to: tips
@thefp
.com
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18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
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27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by
@abigailshrier
@shellenbergermd
@nelliebowles
@isaacgrafstein
and the team The Free Press
@thefp
.
Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: .
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28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.
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23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:
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24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”
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26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”
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25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”
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20. In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, “
#Israel
is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah.
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2. 6:46 am: “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!!!”
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This is so perfect I almost can’t believe it’s real
“You could secretly ban one party’s candidate…secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until AFTER the election.”
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7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.
“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”
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Thinking of Mr. Rogers today. Tree of Life is three blocks from his home. Of this especially: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" Squirrel Hill full of them.
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25. But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.
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21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”
Twitter deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine:
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At Harvard, "fatphobia" constitutes violence.
But "globalize the intifada" requires context.
WATCH:
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1. On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.
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12. But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.
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This was scrawled outside of our offices this week.
If the antisemites who did this think it will intimidate me and the journalists of
@TheFP
, they don’t know me, they don’t know us, and they have no idea what we stand for.
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You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to…
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44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.
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My uber driver today spent 28 years in the military. Served in Iraq. He told me he hasn’t stopped thinking about what the president did yesterday. “It actually hurt me. It was a betrayal.”
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I am dead. Couldn’t get to D.C., but nothing but love for
@ShellenbergerMD
and
@mtaibbi
who do a heroic job of not completely breaking down here.
Through her line of questioning, Rep. Sylvia Garcia reveals she doesn't know who
@bariweiss
is and proceeds to ask a rather...awkwardly worded question.
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The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)
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The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.
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4. For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate.
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It's been quite a weekend:
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23. In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.
Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up, and did not ban the prime minister.
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3. 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
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Ditto. Grateful for
@joerogan
.
I stand with Joe Rogan. It is not a coincidence that the attacks calling him racist come as pressure on Spotify to censor builds.
Politicians and the media profit on division & outrage. They fuel the extremes that make us believe we're divided. We're not. We're in this together.
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22. Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups.“Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war,” he wrote, “will treat them in the language they understand.”
Twitter deleted the tweet but didn't ban Buhari.
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24. In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India, and to incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of accounts that had been critical of him.
Twitter did not ban Modi.
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14. Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”
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If you thought that the Hitler-loving reporter in Gaza was the only scandal
@nytimes
, think again. 🧵
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8. But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.
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19. To understand Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, we must consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
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26. Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Vijaya Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it could, in fact, be “coded incitement to further violence.”
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15. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.”
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6. But after January 6, as
@mtaibbi
and
@shellenbergermd
have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.
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18. Next, Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET tweet is also not in violation. They are unequivocal: “it’s a clear no vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration”
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28. Things escalate from there.
Members of that team came to “view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
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16. She does just that: “as an fyi, Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.”
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13. “It's pretty clear he's saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”
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5. “Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in 2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account.”
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9. After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee.
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11. In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”
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Over the past few months my friend
@DouglasKMurray
has emerged as perhaps the most important defender of the West. Was worth the flight to Tel Aviv to thank him in person.
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Twitter suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy.
This is a story, by
@davidzweig
, that impacted every American...whether or not they have ever logged onto Twitter.
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30. “Multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders,” relays Yoel Roth to a colleague.
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"If you consider yourself 'liberal' or even 'progressive,' it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a…
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29. Two hours later, Twitter executives host a 30-minute all-staff meeting.
Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answer staff questions as to why Trump wasn’t banned yet.
But they make some employees angrier.
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10. “We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” said one staffer.
It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules,” said another.
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27. A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the “scaled enforcement team” suggest that Trump’s tweet may have violated Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the phrase “American Patriots” to refer to the rioters.
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17. (Later, Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6 committee:“For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no intervention into what I saw occuring, people were going to die.”)
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40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
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Jamie Reed is a progressive. She is a queer woman married to a transman. She has devoted her career to the vulnerable.
Which is why she joined the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital four years ago.
Today she is blowing the whistle.
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Love both of these people.
Yes, I will die on this hill. You cannot buy authenticity and love. The reason people *love* Joe Rogan is because the conversations he has on his podcast reflect the conversations that people have in real life.
For starters, the format. It's long and searching and not set up
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In the summer of 2020, the
@nytimes
was plunged into a moral crisis after an oped by
@TomCottonAR
. Hundreds of journalists said the piece put their lives in danger. The opinion editor was pushed out. Others were smeared or demoted.
Compare that to this week. Paper publishes…
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39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”
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45. This was reported by
@ShellenbergerMD
,
@IsaacGrafstein
,
@SnoozyWeiss
,
@Olivia_Reingold
,
@petersavodnik
,
@NellieBowles
. Follow all of our work at The Free Press:
@TheFP
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What should we do now?
Many things.
One of them: End 'DEI'.
It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class—and ultimately America itself.
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I cannot stop laughing
L.A. Mayor Garcetti Says He Held His Breath For Maskless Photo With Magic Johnson
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38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
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It may be shocking for Americans to learn that in Sweden—the land of IKEA, Spotify and Greta Thunberg—there have been almost 500 bombings since 2018 . Perhaps the reason you don’t know about it is because of the uncomfortable reality of how we got here.
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41. Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at Twitter, we hope this latest installment of
#TheTwitterFiles
gave you insight into that unprecedented decision.
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43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.
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35. By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible:
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"My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." Daniel Pearl’s last words are true for me, too. I could not be prouder to be a Jew, and I am deeply honored to be receiving this year's Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism.
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Now we know who would have looked at Jews shoved onto cattle cars and said, “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” Those are the people today saying: “This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing.”
My latest:
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"The goals of Hamas are so complex we can never understand. They are riddles wrapped in poems wrapped in watercolored papier-mâché. No one can know for sure what Hamas means when they say: “The entire planet will be under our law; there will be no more Jews or Christian…
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42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.
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32. One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
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36. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
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Has there been a single story in
@nytimes
,
@washingtonpost
,
@CNN
about the current wave of hate crimes against Jews on the streets of Los Angeles and other major cities across the West? Or have I missed something?
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