The ‘Twitter Files 2.0’ dropped on Thursday night with damning evidence the social media company purposely censored conversative tweets and users..In a series of posts, independent journalist Bari Weiss detailed how Twitter used shadow banning to limit the visibility of tweets coming from far-right users..Weiss identified conservative talk show host Dan Bongino, Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as being some of the users targeted by Twitter..The blacklists were built “in secret” and “without informing users,” said Weiss..“A new 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,” Weiss tweeted, adding the company strayed from its original mission of giving “everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” by developing the methods to suppress specific individuals..Bhattacharya’s account was flagged as being on a “trends blacklist,” according to Weiss, who shared an image of his account from Twitter’s point-of-view with the yellow tag indicating the restriction. . Dr. Jay Bhattacharya censoredDr. Jay Bhattacharya censored .“Bhattacharya argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending,” Weiss wrote..An image of Bongino’s account showed a similar yellow notice that read “search blacklist.”.Weiss posted an image of Kirk’s account. .“Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to ‘Do Not Amplify.’”.Top Twitter executives, including former head of legal policy and trust Vijaya Gadde and head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, have denied in the past the company “shadow bans” users. .“We do not shadow ban,” Gadde and Beykpour said in 2018, per Weiss, “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” .Also in 2018, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed the company didn’t restrict accounts with certain “political viewpoints.”. Charlie Kirk censoredCharlie Kirk censored .“We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off). More on ranking signals,” he added, linking to a company blog post co-authored by Gadde, known as the company’s “censorship chief.”.Weiss reports the former Twitter executives preferred the phrase ‘Visibility Filtering’ or VF over shadow banning..“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” a senior Twitter employee told Weiss..“Visibility Filtering” allows the company 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,” wrote Weiss..“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,” a Twitter engineer told Weiss..The group responsible for deciding which accounts to blacklist was known as the Strategic Response Team — Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. .“It often handled up to 200 ‘cases’ a day,” said Weiss..Beyond SRT-GET, the secretive Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support team, or SIP-PES, was responsible for the most “politically sensitive decisions.”.“This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others,” wrote Weiss..“This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made.”.The popular Libs of TikTok Twitter account is one conservative profile that Weiss says fell under the purview of the SIP-PES team..In an image shared by Weiss, the Libs of TikTok account appeared to have a “Trends Blacklist” and had a red banner warning, “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”.“Think high follower account, controversial,” a Twitter employee told Weiss of the types of accounts SIP-PES would handle. “There would be no ticket or anything” for these accounts, according to the employee. . Libs of Tik Tok censoredLibs of Tik Tok censored .Libs of TikTok was suspended six times in 2022, with the bans lasting as long as a week, for purportedly violating the company’s policy against “hateful conduct.”.However, Weiss discovered an internal SIP-PES message saying Libs of TikTok “has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy” since the account’s seventh suspension. .In the original Twitter Files release, independent journalist, Matt Taibbi, uncovered the “extraordinary steps” Twitter took in response to The New York Post’s blockbuster scoop about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in October 2020, including “removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’”.“They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, eg child pornography,” he wrote..But the company’s “response was to essentially to err on the side of…continuing to err,” Taibbi said..Musk has said ‘Twitter Files 3.0’ will be released by Taibbi in the coming days.
