Bari Weiss has dropped the Twitter Files Part Two:
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
1. 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
2. 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Not only did Twitter employees create a blacklist, they created specific blacklists in order to stifle the reach of accounts they didn’t agree with.
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.” pic.twitter.com/dOyQIVdsW2
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
There seems to be a bit of a trend in the voices they tried to silence.
6. Twitter 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) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dan Bongino, and Charlie Kirk would probably disagree with that statement.
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
“Visibility Filtering”. Quite the fancy phrase for what is, essentially, censorship. That’s the way fascism works, couching bad policies in flowery expressions to make them more palatable to people who think that they themselves will never be subject to those policies.
8. “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 told us.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
9. “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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
10. All without users’ knowledge.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Well…conservative Tweeters did know something was going on. They just didn’t know exactly what.
The people at Twitter did all the bad things we thought they did and way way more.
No wonder they were so freaked out over @elonmusk taking over.— 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙮𝙏𝙖𝙡𝙠 ™ © ® ⓘ 🇺🇸 (@PhillyTalk) December 9, 2022
To those who said claims of censorship were false or attention seeking stunts, I hope you will use critical thinking in the future and remain skeptical of those wielding the most power or influence over the individual. https://t.co/rjcuJtMrtp
— Sam Brown (@CaptainSamBrown) December 9, 2022
https://twitter.com/femlesks/status/1601020923607363585?s=20&t=QQ9mJYSVsyd3-8uM06OdJA
Raise your hand if you knew this, but anytime you tried to bring it up they’d call you “crazy” or a “conspiracy theorist.” https://t.co/52aZhfN6wn
— BlazeTV (@BlazeTV) December 9, 2022
The Twitter Files Two thread continues for quite a while after this, so keep it on Twitchy for updates.
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