Charlie Kirk speaks out after reportedly placed on Twitter's 'Do Not Amplify' list
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk joins 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' after latest Twitter Files dump mentions him
Conservatives who were affected by Twitter's prior managements' alleged suppression of right-leaning or counter-establishment thought sounded off Thursday on Fox News.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk spoke to "Tucker Carlson Tonight" amid the latest installment of the "Twitter Files" dump under new CEO Elon Musk.
Kirk's name came up in the latest tranche, with documents purporting to show his account being placed on "Do Not Amplify" status under the social media giant's prior management.
Kirk said he had suspected some sort of silent suppression but did not know the extent of it until journalist Bari Weiss began sharing the latest tranche late Thursday.
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Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October and immediately fired several top executives. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images (Photo illustration))
The activist said that prior to the alleged suppression, his Twitter account was the fourth-most engaged on the platform, neck-and-neck with then-President Donald Trump's.
"I've been using Twitter for a decade; happened to understand it really well. And we were averaging 115,000 retweets a day when we were really at our peak," he said.
As time went on, he said, his once-open line of communication with Twitter executives ceased, as his account also felt a 95% drop in engagement.
"And now you see actual verified documents where my Twitter account was labeled as "Do Not Amplify" [and] "NSFW… and threat tags," he said.
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LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 20: Charlie Kirk speaks onstage at Politicon (Getty Images)
"They're treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the Prime Minister of Iran? than Hamas? – than people who do actual terroristic-type damage?"
Twitter's former leadership saw Kirk's account as a "direct threat to the regime," he surmised.
Another account that, according to the new Twitter Files dump, drew the company's ire was "Libs of Tik Tok," which typically shares videos of liberals or "woke" individuals who themselves post the content to their social media.
Host Tucker Carlson cited the account's several suspensions, reporting that one uncovered Twitter memo acknowledged "Libs of Tik Tok is directly engaged in behavior, violative of hateful conduct policy."
"So they didn't actually do anything wrong," he said. "But Twitter censors kept censoring and shadow-banning the account Libs of Tik Tok anyway, because according to the memo, Libs of Tik Tok quote ‘either leads to or intends to incite harassment’ specifically against hospitals that are castrating children," he said, appearing to refer to gender-related surgeries.
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Dan Bongino appears on "Fox & Friends Weekend" on Saturday, April 2, 2022. (Fox News)
The owner of the Libs of Tik Tok account joined Carlson to react, saying she now knows she was on a "trend blacklist."
"There were sometimes days or weeks at a time when I felt like my tweets were getting much less engagement than usual, than they should. And I think now it's clear that there was suppression and there were shadow-banning."
Libs of Tik Tok added that it is ironic her account was censored so much, when all it tended to do was re-share videos and views of liberals themselves, only to a wider audience:
"I think it's clear that their views, when they don't stand up to scrutiny and when I spread their views in their own words, they don't want you to see it because they don't stand up to scrutiny, and it makes them look bad. And that's what they're really scared of."
Earlier on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," New York Post reporter Miranda Devine – who has reported extensively on the Biden laptop scandal – said she believes journalist Matt Taibbi, who helped release the first tranche of Twitter files, was "snowed" by ousted Twitter attorney James Baker.
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Hunter Biden's laptop was at the center of a Big Tech censorship campaign in 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Devine alluded to the fact Baker was also previously FBI general counsel during the Trump "RussiaGate."
Citing the fact Weiss was helping release the second tranche, Devine pointed out the former New York Times reporter is not a conservative, and therefore would have likely noted if any "left-wingers" were cited in the suppression-related files.
"Now that Elon Musk has been kind of red-pilled himself and that Jim Baker is gone we might see more things that are useful," she said, calling the operation under Twitter's prior management an "overall censorship scheme" that suppressed dissenting views against the Biden administration or federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
Later, on "Hannity," "Unfiltered" host and former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino bluntly characterized Twitter's past behavior as "Soviet-style bull---t."
Bongino added that he has long heard from listeners that they are able to find him on Facebook and other social media sites but always had a hard time finding him on Twitter despite the fact he has a verified account.
"Bongino is not a common last name. It's not Joe Brown or John Smith. How come you don't come up?" he recounted.
"And it's interesting, when I spoke about this on my show and elsewhere, where I was called a conspiracy theorist and a whacko, just like I was called a conspiracy theorist over SpyGate, over the impeachment hoax, over discussing the idea that cloth masks are not going to protect you from COVID.
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Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, walks to lunch during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 07, 2022 in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Bongino said he has long been suppressed and censored by mainstream tech firms, reporting GoogleAds "banned" his website for "no describable reason whatsoever" and adding that YouTube banned him for suggesting cloth masks aren't effective in preventing spread of the coronavirus.
"And now I find out I'm on a ‘Not Safe For Work’ shadow-ban list on Twitter because I've committed the thought-crime of being a conservative."
"[T]ell me now, all you media clowns and goons and nuts who told me I was the crazy conspiracy theorist – Tell me we live in a free country where three of the largest social media platforms that are the new public space we can all talk in – when an opinion guy like me cannot speak on these platforms or is restricted from doing so… tell me again how we live in a free country."
Bongino went on to offer a public ‘thank-you’ to Elon Musk, saying that he has done "a service to this country."
"He has literally, not figuratively, changed the history of, I think, how Big Tech is going to operate moving forward," Bongino said of the South African-born billionaire.
"He's exposed one key point… that what the press did to collude and interfere and potentially fleece the 2020 election away from Donald Trump based on solid data and polling taken afterwards about how people would have voted if they would have known about the Hunter Biden story… I'm talking strictly about that – the media intentionally did that."
Bongino claimed the FBI, DHS, DNI, officials at the FEC and at Big Tech firms committed "active collusion… to steal away your country."
"And, listen to me folks – they did it. And Elon Musk is trying to help you get it back."
In her Twitter Files dump, Weiss also pointed to Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.
"Twitter secretly placed him on a 'Trends Blacklist,' which prevented his tweets from trending," Weiss reported.
"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," Weiss wrote in beginning her thread on Thursday.
Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.