Twitter Files 2: Vijaya Gadde & Company created ‘secret blacklists’ of ‘right-wing commentators’

New York: “Part Deux” or second part/installment of “Twitter Files” reveals more “dark” secret about the social media giant including company’s practices of “secretly blacklisting” certain tweets and users before Elon Must took over as the CEO. Retweeted by Musk on Friday, the story was originally posted by independent journalist Bari Weiss. In her revelations, she cited some of the conservative accounts including that of a talk show host Dan Bongino, and Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr Jay Bhattacharya, which Weiss claimed were targeted for suppression by Twitter.

The Twitter Files, Part Deux!! 🍿🍿 https://t.co/bH9UiTSEK2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022

Twitter Files 2: The BIG revelations In her tweet thread, Weiss said: “A new #TwitterFiles 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—all in secret, without informing users.” She went on to say that Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” “Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected,” Weiss revealed. Former New York Times (NYT) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) writer, Weiss also posted a screenshot that showed how Twitter used “shadow banning” to limit the reach of tweets from far-right users. A post showed how the micro-blogging site suppressed the opinion of Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid induced lockdowns would harm children. “Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist’, which prevented his tweets from trending,” Weiss claimed. She also tweeted a screenshot of the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino “who was slapped with a ‘Search Blacklist’” by Twitter. Weiss also shared a screenshot that showed Twitter setting the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify". Twitter in the past was accused for the same issue but the platform persistently kept denying it. In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde, who was the then Head of Legal Policy and Trust, and head of product Kayvon Beykpour said: “We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” Weiss quoted sources saying that Twitter executives and employees call “shadow banning” or the practise of suppressing conservative voices as “Visibility Filtering” or “VF”. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” Weiss quoted a senior Twitter employee saying. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It 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, she said. Weiss said that the group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET and that it often handled up to 200 “cases” a day. Revealing the names of the members in the “secret group” she said: “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.” Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.