Elon Musk shared the second installment of "Twitter Files," this time posted by journalist Bari Weiss. The thread revealed that the social network would secretly "blacklist" certain users to limit their visibility by preventing them from trending.
Weiss explained that although Twitter's original mission was to enable instant sharing of ideas and information "without barriers," the company ultimately ended up developing methods to suppress specific people and topics while keeping users in the dark.
The thread revealed that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine, economics and politics at Stanford University who was also an opponent of some of the measures taken during the pandemic, was on the Twitter "blacklist," preventing his tweets from having a wider reach.
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
Other personalities who have also been on this list include talk show host Dan Bongino and activist Charlie Kirk.
Weiss used the second installment of the "Twitter Files" to recall that in 2018 Vijaya Gadde, then Twitter's head of legal policy and trust, and Kayvon Beykpour, head of product, assured that they did not conduct secret ideology-based banning practices.
However, a Twitter engineer and two other employees already confirmed that they regularly monitored the visibility and amplification of certain content.
11. “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 us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Employees of the social network called this practice "visibility filtering" or VF. The journalist later revealed that those responsible for deciding what or whom to blacklist were known as the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET.
However, when it came to the "politically sensitive" decisions, those in charge were a secret group that included Gadde and then CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, among others.
14. 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
According to Weiss, there are still more details to be revealed from the "Twitter Files," and it will be Matt Taibbi, who posted the first installment, who will be sharing the next edition, which will uncover more secrets from the social media giant.
