The latest installment of the Twitter Files delivered a devastating blow to one of Bitcoin Twitter‘s most cherished grievances: nobody was suppressing them. Journalist Matt Taibbi, announcing his findings on a Twitter space, reported that the Feds working inside Twitter had no interest in Bitcoiners whatsoever. “There is a large angry group of Twitter users with #Bitcoin in their bios that post constantly about being shadow banned, which appears to be some sort of engagement farming technique. I have found zero evidence that Twitter employees sought to suppress any accounts associated with Bitcoin,” Taibbi stated.

The finding was doubly inconvenient because posts complaining about being shadow banned reliably garnered immense engagement — a paradox now impossible to hand-wave away since per-post view counts became public.

The Bugle‘s analysis identified two tiers of shadowban complainant: those whose tweets are simply bad, and those who deploy the complaint as an engagement farming technique. For the latter group, the article concluded, the Twitter Files were the final nail in the coffin.

irl: The Twitter Files were a real series of internal-document releases that began after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, with Matt Taibbi among the journalists granted access. The real Files covered content-moderation and government-contact controversies; the “Bitcoiners weren’t targeted” finding and the Taibbi quote are the Bugle’s invention, parodying the genuine Bitcoin Twitter pastime of attributing low engagement to shadowbans.