Twitter employees created blacklists and actively restricted the visibility of entire accounts, according to the second part of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” which sheds light on the hidden practices of the company’s previous management. “A new #TwitterFiles investigation shows that teams of Twitter employees create blacklists, prevent unwanted tweets from trending, and actively restrict the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics – all in secret without informing users,” he said the editor of The Free Press Bari Weiss, in a series of tweets.
“Twitter once had the mission to give everyone the opportunity to create and share ideas and information instantly and without barriers. However, barriers were erected along the way,” she added.
2. Twitter once had the mission of “giving everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers”. Barriers were nevertheless erected along the way.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Although previous management has denied reports of a shadow ban, Weiss said Twitter executives and employees used a powerful tool like “visibility filtering,” or VF, to block searches for individual users and limit the scope of discoverability of a particular tweet.
Weiss said that “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. “It used VF to block searches for individual users, limit the scope of discoverability of a given tweet, block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the trending page, and from inclusion in hashtag searches.”
She said a select group, handling up to 200 “cases” a day, decided whether to restrict the reach of certain users, the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team.
“But there was a layer beyond official ticketing, beyond the grassroots moderators following company policy on paper. This is the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support, known as SIP-PES,” she added.
Weiss said that clandestine group included law, politics and trust leader Vijaya Gadde, global trust and safety leader Yoel Roth and subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawaland other.
“The biggest, politically most sensitive decisions were made here. Think high follower account, controversial, another Twitter contributor told us. There wouldn’t be a ticket for that or anything,” she said.
Last week, journalist Matt Taibbi, in partnership with Musk, released “Twitter Files,” which document Twitter’s internal communications to reveal ties to political actors and to focus on how the social network was covering stories related to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the… 2020 blocked US presidential election.
The released filings claimed that previous Twitter management took steps to quash coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
According to the Twitter files released by Taibbi, Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker played a role in the discussion of whether the laptop story fell under Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy.
The Bidens have been scrutinized and criticized by Republicans and others for their alleged wrongdoing in Hunter Biden’s foreign operations, which came into the public spotlight after the emails were released.
On Monday, the White House dismissed the Twitter files as “full of old messages.”
