Twitter Files 2.0 Reveal ‘Secret Blacklists’ And ‘Shadow Banning’ – Here Is All You Need To Know

Twitter Files 2.0, aided by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, are now out. This time, the second edition of revelations has been released by a journalist Bari Weiss, first in the form of Twitter threads, then on ‘The Free Press.’ This edition of Twitter Files now claims to reveal details about the much-talked about ‘shadow banning’ along with a new thing called ‘secret blacklists.’
 
The journalist’s thread on Twitter Files 2.0 reveals that the social media company had a thing called ‘secret blacklists,’ ones that were built by Twitter employees to disfavour certain tweets and limit activity on the micro-blogging platform. 

Weiss says, “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.”

Let’s take a look at what the trending words shadow banning and secret blacklists are, and what has been revealed in Twitter Files 2.0. 

Also Read | What Are Twitter Files And What Secrets Do They Reveal About Elon Musk’s Platform?

Twitter Files 2: Shadow Banning, Secret Blacklists – Explained    

To put it simply, Twitter Files 2.0 mainly reveal that the social media company had been resorting to both shadow banning and creating secret blacklists in order to suppress some information and avoid its circulation. While the practices have been called as is, Twitter’s team, for its internal communication purposes, as per the thread, calls it ‘visibility filtering.’

One of the related tweets by Weiss read, “What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.......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.”

To simplify for the audience, Weiss goes on to explain that visibility filtering is usually done without the users’ knowledge. She writes, “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.”

The fact that Twitter resorted to using this claimed visibility filtering has also been supported by Weiss with the help of some images of allegedly affected accounts. These include accounts of Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino and conservative activist Charlie Kirk, among many more. 

However, while these images and tweets reveal that Twitter uses such tools to impact the circulation and visibility of tweets, in 2018, it denied doing such things. As per Weiss, “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.”

As audience gauges the nuances of Twitter Files 2.0, apart from the contents, there is another thing that has caught many people’s attention and raised alarms. In the previous version of Twitter Files, some analysts visibly claimed that former CEO Jack Dorsey had nothing to do with anything that was happening. In fact, the Twitter Files 1 also went on to assert that the former CEO had no idea of what was going on.

However, with the release of Twitter Files 2.0, Dorsey’s name has come in. Weiss writes, “The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 cases a day. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support, known as SIP-PES.”

It is here that Weiss brings in the name of Jack Dorsey. She adds, “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. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made.”

Till now, the Twitter Files 2.0 thread has received thousands of likes and retweets. While many are surprised at the revelations, others are taking them with a pinch of salt and questioning why Elon Musk is supporting them. As people await answers, a new thread on Twitter Files is expected soon, this time again from Matt Taibbi.