Dave Rubin on Twitter suspension and reinstatement
Author of 'Don't Burn This Country' and 'The Rubin Report' host Dave Rubin gives his take on his Twitter battles as well as recall efforts against L.A. District Attorney George Gascon on 'The Story.'
Political commentator Dave Rubin received a behind-the-scenes look at Twitter and why the code that owner Elon Musk called a "flaming dumpster rolling down the street" continues to limit engagement for some users.
Rubin wrote Thursday that he spent the last two days in San Francisco talking to Twitter engineers, product managers and owner Elon Musk and was given permission to share his findings. Musk has been open about his desire to expose once-secret communications that occurred inside Twitter before he took control of the social media juggernaut last year. He has been slowly allowing independent journalists to reveal their findings, and while Rubin’s thread is not technically part of the "Twitter Files," he put a spotlight on the company’s inner workings.
"Learned a ton about what’s going on. Before I share, want to note that after couple hour meeting I asked Elon what I could share and he said, ‘anything that’s true,’" Rubin wrote.
WHAT ELON MUSK'S TWITTER FILES HAVE UNCOVERED ABOUT THE TECH GIANT SO FAR
Twitter owner Elon Musk has been vocal about being transparent when it comes to Twitter's past and present actions curating content on the platform. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images (Photo illustration))
The "Rubin Report" host said Musk calls Twitter a "A Fractal Rube Goldberg Machine" that features staffers working around-the-clock.
"As they fix the code more problems arise. A delicate balance he likened to a Jenga tower. One wrong move the whole thing collapses. They’re working nonstop, and both times I met him were after midnight," Rubin wrote.
Twitter executives had long rejected claims by conservatives that they were being "shadowbanned," a term referring to clandestine efforts to limit cetain users' engagement and reach.
The second installment of the Twitter Files confirmed such a practice took place, and Rubin set out to find out why it’s still happening.
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"I met with several engineers who were doing a deep dive on why my account and so many others seem to be absolutely crushed after that two or three week return to normalcy when Elon first took over. They still have more questions than answers, but they did learn a bunch of stuff," he continued. "Accounts aren’t just hit with labels that are obvious to insiders. They now found more ‘secret’ labels which are causing shadowbans. My account was hit with all three; ‘Recent abuse strike,’ ‘Recent misinformation strike,’ ‘Recent suspension strike.’"
Rubin added that it’s "unclear so far what these strikes actually do, but for sure they suppress views and recommendations, they are trying to figure out to what extent." He noted there are "many innocuous tweets labeled NSFW or NSFA (not safe for ads) which affect visibility in the timeline."
He pointed to "an entire KeyWord database" that helps machines learn not to promote violence, porn or other frowned-upon activity, but called it a "mess of overreaching" words.
"Literally the word ‘gay’ was on the KeyWord list which would make you not advertiser friendly and harm the tweet in the algo," Rubin wrote.
"Backing up for a sec, they found the ‘recent suspension strike’ on my account most interesting because it was fro[m] July 2022, when I was suspended for calling out @jordanbpeterson’s unjust suspension. So though suspension was reversed the action on the account remained," Rubin added.
"Elon was bringing people in and out constantly and seems to be aware of pretty much every issue. He thinks maybe the entire code has to be torn down and start from scratch. At the end last night he said that the whole situation is ‘a flaming dumpster rolling down the street,’" Rubin wrote. "So I assure you they are aware of the problems and Elon and engineers are there all night trying to untie this crazy knot. Some changes they’ve made, like the ‘For You’ tab, have confused people and hurt engagement for accounts who have gotten the NSFA label without knowing."
Rubin added, "They also don’t know for sure why things got so much better once Elon made the acquisition and why it seems far worse now. Some is probably related to excitement around Elon himself, which also coincided with World Cup, but that doesn’t explain why it feels so off right now."
Rubin promised to share more eventually but had to stop the thread because he had a flight to catch.
"On a personal note Elon is funny as hell, laughs a ton and it’s just really obvious he cares about Twitter because he cares about free speech and the bigger problems facing the world. He doesn’t need this headache, he chose it," Rubin wrote.
In the second installment of the Twitter Files, Free Press editor Bari Weiss previously revealed Twitter's "blacklisting" of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.
Internal communications also reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its "hateful conduct" policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.
Those revelations appeared to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified to Congress under oath in 2018 that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.
Other installments of Twitter Files have focused on everything from internal discussions on how it came to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to what led to the suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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