Shadow Banning, Secret Blacklists, Targeting Of Non-Left Accounts: Elon Musk Unveils Twitter Files Part Two

Tech Billionaire Elon Musk on Friday (8 December) unveiled the second part of the 'Twitter Files' on Twitter.

Musk tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Bari Weiss, who began posting a series of what appeared to be Twitter internal communications, documents and screenshots.

According to Weiss, investigation revealed that teams of Twitter employees built blacklists, prevented disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

Weiss said that Twitter secretly placed Standford University's Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children, on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

At one point, Twitter also slapped popular American right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, with a “Search Blacklist".

Further, the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was set to "Do Not Amplify".

Weiss said that Twitter had 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) had said, “We do not shadow ban

They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

Another interesting revelation made by Weiss is that Twitter engaged in "shadow banning" by curtailing the reach of certain users.

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

“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 was quoted as saying.

“VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility, Weiss said.

She further said that Twitter 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 users’ knowledge," Weiss added.

She added that in their internal Slack communications, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.