On Wednesday, there were many dramatic moments at the House Oversight Committee hearing.
Among the most instructive was Rep. Byron Donalds’ (R-FL), nailed the former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Rot for Twitter’s contact to the Biden team to suppress Twitter tweets. Even though Roth claimed not to remember his contact, he showed him the email contact and demonstrated that Roth was well-versed in knowing random URLs.
Many conservatives have been concerned about being “shadow banned”, which is when you can still tweet, but your account doesn’t get the visibility it deserves and you don’t know if your account has been flagged or blocked from being seen.
Even though it was obvious, Jack Dorsey maintained it wasn’t. He even testified that prominent conservatives weren’t being shadow banned from Congress.
Elon Musk then came in to show that there was a blacklist, with conservatives such as Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino. It was called “visibility filtering”, not shadow banning. Jack wasn’t just gaslighting everyone.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R.OH) was asking Roth about the “visibility filtering”, and asked him if it has been used to elected officials. Roth said he didn’t know and looked like a deer caught up in the headlights.
Roth stated, “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that visibility filtering labels were applied to the accounts elected officials.” Jordan said that the official would not have known about it. Roth replied that Twitter does not inform people about visibility filtering. Roth stated that he could not say for certain if filters were applied to elected officials.
This is when Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, fired Roth. Jonathan Turley, a George Washington Law Professor, posted about Roth’s comment to the effect that visibility filters were applied to elected officials.
Musk tweeted, “Since He Placed Many of Them There Himself, he wouldn’t be surprised’ lmao.”
Oops! That’s a microphone drop. One has to believe that Jordan has all the receipts and has full access to everything. Jim Jordan and other members of Congress may want to ask the question again with the evidence so that we can see exactly who was filtering.
