Elon Musk has released the second part of the Twitter Files showing how the platform has blacklisted certain individual accounts. The details in part two have been reported by Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press.
The new Twitter Files probe has revealed that teams of Twitter staffer construct blacklists, stop unwanted tweets from trending, and intentionally reduce the visibility of whole accounts or even trending topics, without notifying users.
Weiss claims they constituted a'secret group' that was beyond the reach of moderators and the standard ticketing process to deal with policy violations.
Weiss claimed that the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions were made in this area. A Twitter employee said these were high follower accounts and there would be no ticket or anything. Weiss shared screenshots of how various accounts were labeled internally in order to limit their reach on Twitter. These accounts belonged to conservative, right-wing people like talk show host Dan Bongino and Stanford University's anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr Jay Bhattacharya.
Weiss spoke about the culture of'shadow-banning' on Twitter. Weiss claims that the platform is just a change in terminology and weiss has always denied the existence of shadow bans on Twitter. The term Twitter was used instead as Visibility Filtering.
By using Visibility Filtering, Twitter tried to block searches for individual accounts, which limited the reach of that individual's tweets and updates. Weiss blamed Twitter for blocking certain users posts from appearing on the trending page.