“Live Tweeting” Second Episode: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists

Live Tweeting: Bari Weiss published second installment of the Twitter Files. It’s a series of tweets exposing the micro-blogging platform’s efforts to suppress free speech. The part two of the Twitter Files revealed “Twitter’s secret blacklists” on Friday, 9 December 2022.

Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, shared the investigation in a Twitter thread. She alleged Twitter employees had built blacklists to actively limited the visibility of certain accounts and “even trending topics” without informing users.

Earlier Elon Musk has revealed internal communications, pertaining to the censorship of the Hunter Biden story. It exposed how the Twitter moderation team justified the censorship of the Hunter Biden story.

Twitter’s Secret Blacklists

The second part of the ‘Twitter Files’ gave a glimpse of who routinely censored right-wing accounts and non-mainstream narratives with complete disregard for Twitter’s rules.

In a series of posts, Ms. Weiss described how Twitter used “shadow banning” to limit the visibility of tweets from far-right users.

 

The journalist cited the example of Indian origin Stanford University Professor Dr Jay Bhattacharya who had challenged Covid-19 lockdowns in the USA. Sharing a screenshot of his account, Weiss said, Twitter put Bhattacharya on a “Trends Blacklist” which prevented his tweets from trending.

Bhattacharya had opposed US Covid restrictions and said that school closures and lockdowns would be damaging and harmful to children. Reacting to the thread, Bhattacharya on Twitter said he was still trying to process his emotions after learning that he had been blacklisted.

“The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt,” he said.

Twitter had earlier denied such allegations. 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,” Weiss claimed.

The practice of suppressing conservative voices is known as “Visibility Filtering” or “VF” internally.

“What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning,” she tweeted.

One twitter engineer says to Weiss, “Normal people do not know how much we do,” referring to how often the feature was used. She also named top Twitter executives including ex-CEO Parag Agarwal and Jack Dorsey as being involved in the operation.

Weiss claimed they constituted a ‘secret group’ that was beyond the reach of moderators and the standard ticketing process to deal with policy violations. 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, she said.

“This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made,” she said.

Weiss also revealed screenshots of internal Slack messages. It shows how employees discussed using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.

Also read: Twitter New Feature “Live Tweeting” First Episode: Hunter Biden Story

Elon Musk Shared the Live Tweeting thread of the Journalist. He said Twitter is working on a software update that will our true account status. So we can clearly know if we are shadow banned or not.