Yes and also meaning (and extremely likely in this case to be the reason - rightly or wrongly) "do not lift these restrictions until first contacting this other group."?
Not my first thought when reading the words "no action whitelist" Yours?
At Twitter's volumes, lifting of restrictions manually doesn't scale. Speaking as an outsider: how I would design it would have the lifting of restrictions being automated and set up at the time restrictions are applied (set on a timer or deletion of an offending tweet). Lifting of restrictions manually would be far less frequent than applying them.
With that in mind, I get the distinct impression that the LoTT account was being treated with kid gloves/white gloves.
"Kid gloves" seems like a reasonable inference to me. There are sufficiently prominent cases where scaling doesn't matter a damn, eg the decision to suspend or not the president. Taibbi claimed there was a lot of back-channel manual intervention going on from both repubs and dems for manual intervention. One would imagine there was a lot also not from partisan politics. Back channel who you know seems like one of the way things were done. Did it get out of hand? Should it be done at all. Plenty to discuss there.
The other inference that occurred to me is that multiple twitter departments pulled these levers and didn't always have one view on it - hence the "don't flippin' touch this" sign with the message on who to talk to. That's not there as an endrun around automation.
> There are sufficiently prominent cases where scaling doesn't matter a damn, eg the decision to suspend or not the president
Does @LoTT belong to such distinguished company? I don't know, but I know this is not an instance of Twitter "silencing the voices on the right" despite the context of the reporting
Belong? Will they clearly were being treated as a special case.
This is clearly a case of a tipping the scales against a non-liberal voice and is being provided as an example of how these things worked.
Was the treatment deserved, justified, correct or not? This is the question. How arbitrary is it? How could that be abused to lose Hillary an election? (Or whoever). Was it? Most importantly how does this process fare when government officials and politicians make direct threats when making censorship demands?
I find this case a lot less interesting than finding out about the involvement of the fbi etc. I'm far more interested to see if and how Wikileaks stories were de-boosted or not as one controversial example. People claimed that blogging about Assange's court case suddenly got no Twitter referrals. Possible? If so, was it true? If so Why? Did Twitter employees put their thumb on the same to boost (or bury) Bernie?
All these things, i guess we'll see. I strongly doubt Taibi would be in on a cover up unless the CIA had him by the balls or similar, don't know much about Bari. We'll have a lot more confidence whatever comes out. Perhaps some of the people repeating (on twitter) how uninteresting it all is are worried it's too interesting? I'm fascinated to see how much or little was going on, how and why.
ie "Even if this is wrong don't touch it"