The second part of the Twitter Files has been published. Journalist Bari Weiss, Elon Musk’s other collaborator, takes over, as announced by journalist Matt Taibbi. The sequel to Hunter Biden’s laptop case and Twitter’s interference in the 2020 presidential election is this time titled “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists.” Bari Weiss does not directly discuss the scandal, but demonstrates, in a new threadhow the platform limited the reach of tweets from multiple personalities using “powerful tools”.
In his thread, Bari Weiss explains that previous Twitter employees and managers created blacklists to prevent certain tweets from becoming trending. It was a question of limiting, thanks to tools, the visibility of accounts or even of certain trends (Twitter trend), without informing users.
The journalist cited, with a screenshot in support, the case of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, who had expressed his opposition to confinement during the epidemic of coronavirus in 2020. “Twitter secretly put him on a ‘trending blacklist’ which prevented his tweets from getting significant reach”she wrote.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
She also cites the cases of famed right-ranked animator Dan Bongino, who was placed on the “search blacklist” while Tory activist Charlie Kirk was placed on the list “Do not amplify”.
Shadow ban to limit searches or reach
Bari Weiss recalls that Twitter has denied such methods of “shadow banning” in 2018, when head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde said, along with Kayvon Beykpour, chief product officer at Twitter, that “we certainly do not apply the shadow ban on the basis of political or ideological points of view”. From their point of view, it is a “visibility filtering, a very powerful tool”, whose use was confirmed by several employees of the platform to the journalist. “Think of visibility filtering as a way for us to remove what people see at different levels”we explain to him. “We control the visibility enough. And we control the amplification of the content a bit. And users don’t know what we are doing”also explained a Twitter engineer.
The social network has thus used this tool to block user searches, to limit the reach (reach) of a tweet or to prevent posts from becoming trending. Decisions were not made by any employee of the moderation team, but by the “Strategic Response and Global Escalation Group” (SRT-GET), which handled up to “200 cas” a day,” Weiss says.
The reporter also mentions the existence of the “Site Integrity Policy and Policy Escalation Support” (SIP-PES) team, which included Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth and ex-CEOs , Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, among others.
Bari Weiss evokes the case of “Libs Of TikTok”, a Twitter account that makes fun of the liberals (Libs is an abbreviation of liberals, people on the left) by regularly reposting videos taken from TikTok and content posted on social networks. It was in the trending blacklist and the processing of its content was entirely up to this SIP-PES team. The account which belongs to a certain Chaya Raichik and which totals more than 1.4 million subscribers has been subject to six one-week suspensions in 2022 alone.
Yoel Roth wanted to go further
The social network explained these suspensions by a “violation of Twitter’s policy against hateful conduct”. However, a note from the SIP-PES team indicates that Twitter recognizes that this account “did not engage in behavior contrary to the hateful conduct policy”, although that was the reason for suspension given to Chaya Raichik. The problem lay according to Twitter in its messages which “encourage online harassment of hospitals and medical providers” by implying that “gender affirming” medical procedures are child abuse.
These processes of shadow banning were clearly not enough for previous Twitter managers, including moderation manager Yoel Roth, who had asked his team to conduct more “research” in order to strengthen the intervention of the tools of “disabling engagements, ‘de-amplification’ or visibility filtering”.
How were these tools used in the Hunter Biden case, which is the main object of the Twitter Files, supposed to show the interference of the social network in the 2020 election? Bari Weiss did not reveal new details, but gave an appointment for future revelations on the account of Matt Taibbi.
Last Friday, a first set of documents proving Twitter “interference” in previous US elections through the laptop scandal of Hunter Biden, the son of current US President Joe Biden, were released. published by journalist Matt Taibbi.
The exchanges show that Joe Biden’s team was asking Twitter employees to remove specific political content in October 2020, just weeks before his election as President of the United States. Employees of the social network deliberately suspended and censored links on this case, claiming a breach of the platform’s policy on privacy. “pirated material”.
“If Twitter approves a team’s bid before an election by shutting down dissenting voices in a crucial election, that’s the very definition of election interference”, Musk said. And to add: “Frankly, Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was nonsense.”
Asked during an audio chat in which he mentioned the “significant risk” that he would be assassinated, Elon Musk claimed to have authorized “unobstructed access” to old internal documents of the two journalists. “I don’t control the narrative. It’s just obvious that there’s been a lot of scrutiny and suppression of information, including things that affected the election…“, he had said.
The boss of Tesla will learn a few days later that the lawyer of Twitter, also a former lawyer of the FBI, Jim Baker, proceeded to the verification, even to the “censorship” of the first batch of “Twitter Files”, “without the new management being informed”. He announced that he had fired him.