Thursday night saw the release of the second episode of “The Twitter Files,” which revealed Twitter’s “secret blacklists.”
Elon Musk, a wealthy entrepreneur, vowed to expose papers demonstrating Twitter’s restriction of free expression under the previous ownership shortly after acquiring the firm. These records are known as the “Twitter Files.”
Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, two independent journalists, were given access to the material. The first chapter, which was posted by Taibbi through Twitter on December 2 and detailed Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, was released by Taibbi.
Weiss disclosed in the first few tweets of “THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO” that entire teams of Twitter workers compiled their own blacklists to suppress and “shadow ban” the reach of specific accounts.
Some consider shadowbanning to be the technique of suppressing a user here and there for a variety of reasons. But Twitter’s actions were considerably worse. This was not a minor procedure.
There exist lists, or blacklists, of entire groups of people whom Twitter has arbitrarily chosen to eliminate. And former liberal New York Times writer Weiss asserts that at least a portion of the operation was motivated by politics.
One such user was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford.
According to Weiss, Bhattacharya suggested that COVID lockdowns were extremely harmful to young children, a position that ultimately proved to be entirely accurate.
This resulted in the professor being placed on a “Trends Blacklist,” which limited the reach of his tweets. This stopped Bhattacharya from ever becoming popularity.
In addition, Weiss said that conservative talk show host Dan Bongino and conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been placed on the “Search Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” blacklists, respectively.
Weiss has uploaded an image depicting Twitter’s internal reporting mechanism. Employees might apply a variety of censoring marks to each account. The account of Bhattacharya was tagged with “Recent Abuse Strike” and “Trends Blacklist.”
The following labels were assigned to Bongino’s account: “NSFW View,” “Strike Count,” “Notifications Spike,” and “Search Blacklist.”
3. 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. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
This contradicts prior statements made by top Twitter officials denying the existence of blacklisting practices such as shadow banning.
6. Twitter denied that it does 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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
According to Weiss, shadow banning (unknowingly lowering users’ exposure) was referred to as “Visibility Filtering” internally at Twitter.
More on this story via The Western Journal:
“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 former employee told Weiss and Taibbi.
10. All without users’ knowledge.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022