Elon Musk dropped ‘The Twitter Files Part 2’ Thursday night highlighting the social network’s use of “blacklists” and other methods to suppress speech.
According to Bari Weiss, Founder and Editor of The Free Press, a new Twitter Files 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 went on to report that Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
The Free Press journalist then went on to site an example, that pertained to “Blacklists”
“Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. The blacklists allowed users to continue to Tweet but made it impossible for their posts to ever gain traction.
Another example of an account that was blacklisted was Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
Charlie Kirk, Founder & President of Turning Point USA and host of the Charlie Kirk Show, had his account set to “Do Not Amplify”.
Bari Weiss explained in her Twitter thread that Twitter denied that it ever did such things. In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” It is now clear that they lied.
What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told The Free Press.
“VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches – all without the users knowledge.
“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told Weiss. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day.
To Read The Full Twitter Thread, Click Here
