Reinstating banned Twitter accounts certainly alarmed Taylor Lorenz as well. According to newly disclosed Twitter files, Lorenz successfully banned an account only a few weeks prior to publishing her Washington Post essay. Other files show Lorenz behind other bans and that Twitter seemed to have a special relationship with her, sending out an alert after Tucker Carlson did a short segment on Fox News ridiculing her often-criticized reporting.

The month before Lorenz’s article alleging that Musk was “opening the gates of hell”, she successfully pushed to ban a Twitter account with a small following called @fearthefloof. This account dug into her past and detailed her life as a Manhattan rich girl, who attended a Swiss boarding school, and has a well-connected sister named Brook Lorenz—a publicist who has worked at CNN, the Washington Post and CBS News.

According to this now deactivated account, Lorenz is also able to scrub much of her past from web searches because her uncle owns the internet archive, which stores old webpages. …

Digging through Twitter’s files, I discovered other examples where Twitter granted Lorenz special privileges. After Tucker Carlson did a brief March 2021 Fox News segment deriding Lorenz’s penchant for labeling criticism of herself as “harassment,” one Twitter official alerted colleagues to monitor tweets about the Post columnist—“We need to be careful with her.”

This image inside Twitter of Lorenz as “victim” was likely aided by her near constant stream of complaints, asking Twitter to take down and suspend accounts. In another example, last fall, Lorenz reported and successfully suspended the account of Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya after he tweeted an email one of her journalist friends sent him.

[Some of this is well-known Lorenz lore, but the extent of internal support from Twitter employees is new. It’s quite lengthy but well worth reading. Note well at the end that the Washington Post, which employs Lorenz, won’t comment on the ethics of these arrangements by which Lorenz managed to silence her critics. — Ed]