The Conspiracy Theories Were Real, and Other Revelations

It was all real — and you can’t possibly believe it was just Twitter.

On December 8, 2022, during the second drop of Elon Musk–sourced “Twitter files” revelations about the popular social-media platform’s behavior before Musk’s takeover, former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss demonstrated that Twitter maintained a wide variety of sophisticated tools used to silence controversial accounts. Weiss provided multiple empirical examples, across a thread of almost 30 tweets. For example, respected Stanford University physician and researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” in 2021 — preventing his micro-blogs from ever...