The efforts of Twitter to prevent specific individuals from trending and being prominent are detailed in the platform’s internal documents.
Part two of the Twitter Files was published on Thursday night by The Free Press’s founder and editor, Bari Weiss, under the title “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists,” which limited the accessibility of certain information to specific individuals.
Weiss stated that while Twitter’s original goal was to “give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information quickly, without limits,” the platform had since “erect[ed] obstacles.”
She claimed that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford had argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children, prompting Twitter to “secretly” put him on a “Trends Blacklist,” preventing his tweets from trending. Bhattacharya did not respond to Thursday’s requests for comment on whether or not he was aware of the blocklist.
Talk show host, Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, and conservative activist Charlie Kirk were also removed from the service.
According to Weiss, Twitter’s former head of legal policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde, and current director of product, Kayvon Beykpour, both declared in 2018: “We do not shadow ban… and we certainly do not shadow ban based on political beliefs or philosophy.”
On July 26, 2018, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey made a similar comment, expanding on it by saying, “We do sort tweets by default to make Twitter more instantly relevant (which can be shut off).”
Weiss said that executives and staff use the phrase “Visibility Filtering” instead of the more derogatory “shadow banning.”
“Consider visibility filtering to limit what individuals are exposed to on a sliding scale. Weiss quotes a top Twitter employee saying, “It’s strong too.”
Weiss noted that Twitter’s visibility filtering controls who can see what is on the platform and whether their tweets show up on the trending page or in a hashtag search, and if they can be discovered at all.
Two Twitter workers and a Twitter developer verified to Weiss that Twitter has considerable influence over which tweets are seen and how far they are shared. And regular folks have no idea how much we accomplish.
Twitter also has a Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET) that handles up to 200 instances daily, making the call on whether or not to restrict a user’s reach.
Weiss mentioned a further tier, SIP-PES (Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support).
Gadde, Yoel Roth (global head of trust and safety), Jack Dorsey (successor to Gadde as CEO), and Parag Agrawal (successor to Dorsey) were all members of the SIP-PES.
“The most politically delicate decisions,” as Weiss put it, were made by this group.
One Twitter employee added, “Think high follower account, contentious,” and said there was no ticket or anything for these actions.
Weiss also shared company-wide Slack conversations on limiting tweet exposure.
“The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that,” said Roth. “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”