As part of his reforms, Musk has been revealing the questionable censorship practices of the previous management. The latest revelations, posted by journalist Bari Weiss, are a real doozy, according to Fox News.
“The second installment of Elon Musk’s so-called ‘Twitter Files’ shed light on the company’s practices of secretly “blacklisting” certain tweets and users.
“‘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,’ journalist Bari Weiss began her thread on Thursday.”
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December 11, 2022
Critics of the previous management of Twitter called the practice “shadow banning.” The idea was that a Twitter user placed on the shadow-banning blacklist would have severely limited exposure to his or her tweets. The ways that a Twitter user could be shadow-banned were varied according to the whims of Twitter middle management, Bari Weiss explained.
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“She pointed to Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.
December 11, 2022
“‘Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending,’ Weiss reported.
“Weiss highlighted that Fox News host Dan Bongino was placed on a ‘Search Blacklist’ and Twitter had Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on ‘Do Not Amplify.’”
Bongino quickly expressed his displeasure on Twitter. “We ALWAYS knew we were a target of the Twitter suppression machine. ALWAYS. Yet liberals insisted it was another ‘conspiracy theory.’ Tonight is vindication, yet I expect no apologies from liberals. They live to abuse power and they’ll make no apologies for doing so.”
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According to the Blaze, Twitter had initially denied that they shadow-banned anyone. Now that Elon Musk has the documentation, Twitter engineers admit indulging in the practice they termed “Visibility Filtering.”
“There was an official team that handled the shadow-banning of about 200 users per day, but there was also a specialized executive team for the more sensitive cases of users with high follower counts. One of those was the popular Libs of TikTok account.
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“That account was publicly suspended for hateful conduct, but interior emails said otherwise.”
The Libs of Tik Tok got into trouble with Twitter because they suggested that treatments called “gender-affirming care” constitutes child abuse. While the statement did not technically meet Twitter’s standards of unacceptable content, the previous management decided to shadow-ban them anyway, the theory being that the message could lead to harassment or worse against physicians offering the “gender-affirming care.”
Weiss promises that more revelations are forthcoming.