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The Twitter Files 2.0 — how teams ‘blacklisted users, stopped tweets from trending’

Two US journalists have been tweeting exposé claiming former Twitter executives censored content & imposed stealth bans on users based on bias and political considerations.

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New Delhi: Former employees of Twitter secretly censored and blacklisted users, preventing their tweets from trending or reaching a mass audience on the platform, the second part of the ‘Twitter Files’ has claimed. The exposé by two US journalists purports to show how bias and political considerations have led to censorship on Twitter.

In 2018, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the employees of Twitter have a “left-leaning” bias but said that it doesn’t influence the policies of the platform. The Twitter Files claim that it does.

One alleged example relates to the account of Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, who during the pandemic took a view contrary to the mainstream consensus and “argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children”. According to the exposé, “Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist”, which prevented his tweets from trending.”

Bari Weiss, founder and editor of the media company The Free Press, posted the second part of the exposé in a series of tweets Friday, adding that more instalments could be expected.

Journalist and author Matt Taibbi had posted the first instalment on 3 December. The crux of this part was Twitter’s alleged suppression of a New York Post story about US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his laptop — which was at the centre of a political scandal that broke out amid Biden’s campaign for the presidency.

According to Taibbi, the information in the Twitter Files is “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter”. It has not been independently verified.

Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has promoted the release of both parts of the Twitter Files.

According to CNN, Musk has “criticised the mainstream media for downplaying the “Twitter Files” release, while accusing news organisations — particularly The New York Times, The The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — of “setting agendas” in their coverage of the story”.

Dorsey also weighed in on the Twitter Files after the first instalment was released — and got a response from Musk.

 


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What’s in Twitter Files 2?

Weiss, who posted the second thread, was formerly with The New York Times’s opinion department. She resigned in 2020, saying she faced “constant bullying by colleagues” for her views.

In her resignation letter, Weiss had alleged that Twitter influenced the editorial judgement at The New York Times. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper…”, she wrote.

In her thread Friday, she claimed 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”.

Apart from the Stanford professor, she cited other examples of alleged censorship such as the case of American Right-wing talk show host Dan Bongino, whose account was apparently labelled as “Search Blacklist”. Meanwhile, the account of another American conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, was allegedly set to “Do Not Amplify”.

On online platforms, the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content in a way that’s not readily apparent to them is known as ‘shadow banning’.

According to Weiss, several high-level former Twitter employees have denied that the platform carries out shadow banning, especially over politics. However, she claimed that “multiple high-level sources” have told her that the practice —  apparently called “visibility filtering” by Twitter executives and employees — does indeed exist.

She also claimed that decisions around limiting reach were taken by a body called the “Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team or SRT-GET” and that they often handled “200 cases a day”.

Weiss further alleged that beyond the SRT-GET, there was a secret group — “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support known as SIP-PES.” This group, which allegedly decided on limiting user reach for accounts with high follower counts, included a host of executives who were fired by Musk after his takeover.

“This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made,” Weiss claimed, adding that a Twitter employee told her these decisions took place without a formal ticketing process.

Weiss cites the account @libsoftiktok, whose reach was limited and decided by the high-level secret group. It is a popular far-Right, anti-LGBT account that, The Washington Post has reported, fuels the “Right’s outrage machine”.

She also shared supposed screenshots of internal messages sent by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-global head of trust & safety, on the communication platform Slack.

She ended the 30-tweet thread by asking readers to watch Taibbi’s account for the “next instalment”.


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What’s in part one?

Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone contributing editor, was described by New York magazine’s Intelligencer in 2021 as one of the “former darlings” of the liberal media and now one of its “loudest critics”. In the article, he is quoted as saying that he “lost” much of his audience and faced criticism “for not being sufficiently aggressive in my coverage of (former US President Donald) Trump”.

Tweeting the exposé’s first instalment last week, Taibbi said the Twitter Files was “a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer”.

He went on to share a screenshot of an alleged email exchange showing requests from US political parties to delete tweets that were then “handled” by Twitter.

Referring to the tools Twitter had developed for content moderation, Taibbi said, “Both parties (Republicans and Democrats) had access to these tools.” But they were more “open” to the Democrats.

Discussing the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Taibbi wrote, “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe’. They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”

He alleged that Kayleigh McEnany, then a spokeswoman for the Trump White House, was “locked out of her account for tweeting about the story”.

Taibbi claimed that these decisions were “made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of (then) CEO Jack Dorsey, with the former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.”

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)


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