Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” second chapter was reportedly released Thursday night, revealing how the social media company was quietly “blacklisting” conservative messages and accounts.
In a series of stories, independent journalist Bari Weiss described how Twitter employed “shadow banning” to reduce the appearance of tweets from far-right users.
According to Weiss, conservative talk show presenter Dan Bongino, Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown champion Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk were among the users targeted by Twitter.
According to Weiss, Bhattacharya’s account was reported as being on a “trends blacklist,” and he posted a snapshot of his account from Twitter’s perspective, with the yellow tag indicating the limitation.
Weiss points out that top Twitter executives have previously disputed that the business “shadow bans” users, including former director of legal policy and trust Vijaya Gadde and head of product Kayvon Beykpour.
In addition to the bombshell revelation, Twitter CEO Elon Musk also confirmed that a number of politicians were also being directly shadow banned by former Twitter staff.
Weiss’ thread also revealed the existence of the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP-PES), a group of top Twitter officials including Gadde, Roth, and previous CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal that made decisions on account limits.
A list of political candidates who faced similar limitations has yet to be disclosed.
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