For these reasons, the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends. (...)

Twitter has made no secret of the fact that it punishes accounts by limiting their visibility. Since at least 2018, Twitter’s help page has said, “When abuse or manipulation of our service is reported or detected, we may take action to limit the reach of a person’s tweets.” Twitter also listed “Limiting tweet visibility” as an enforcement option under the company’s terms of service, writing, “This makes content less visible on Twitter, either by making tweets ineligible for amplification in top search results and on timelines for users who don’t follow the tweet author, by down-ranking tweets in replies (except when the user follows the tweet author), and/or excluding tweets and/or accounts in email or in-product recommendations.”

Twitter’s current ownership has openly embraced this form of content moderation. Last month, Musk tweeted: “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”

Nevertheless, after reporting that the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had been put on a “Do not amplify” list, Weiss bizarrely claimed that Twitter had long “denied that it does such things.”

Weiss did not try to reconcile that claim with Twitter’s long-standing terms of service; in fact, she did not even inform her readers of the existence of those terms. Rather, in justifying her assertion, Weiss wrote, “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,’” a term that she proceeds to define as “visibility filtering.”

But Gadde and Beykpour never denied that Twitter limited the visibility of some accounts. Rather, in their blog post, they wrote, “The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” And Twitter does not in fact “shadow ban” in that sense of the term.

Weiss ostensibly read Gadde and Beykpour’s blog post. So, she knew that they did not actually deny that Twitter limited the visibility of some accounts. Yet she led her readers to believe that she’d caught Twitter in a lie. In other words, she deliberately misled her audience. (...)

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

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