The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, shared This Thursday another part of the files on the platform’s censorship, referring to a thread by journalist Bari Weiss.
Weiss reported that the new investigation reveals that the platform “created blacklists”, “prevented unfavorable tweets from trending” and “actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics” without informing netizens.
Specifically, according to the journalist, Twitter included in said “blacklist” to Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that “covid-19 lockdowns would harm children”, to right-wing American presenter Dan Bongino and to conservative activist Charlie Kirk. However, the social network “denied that it does such things,” he added.
In addition, he indicated that several employees of the platform confirmed that Twitter used “a visibility filter” as “a very strong tool” to “suppress what people see at different levels.” This tool was used to “block searches by individual users, limit the discoverability of a particular tweet, block posts from certain users from ever appearing on the trending page, and from being included in feeds.” hashtag searches,” reads Weiss’s post.
Likewise, the journalist wrote that the group that was in charge of limiting the reach of certain users was called the Strategic Response Team (World Escalation Team or SRT-GET), but there was also a secret group of senior executives. of the platform “where the most important decisions were made and politically sensitive. The secret group included Head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Global Director of Trust and Security Yoel Roth, as well as CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal and others.
Among other things, Weiss had access to internal correspondence from Twitter employees that reveals that the social network used tools to restrict the visibility of tweets and topics. when no direct infringement can be found. “If exposure to, for example, misinformation directly causes harm, we must employ remedies that reduce exposure,” former global director of Platform Trust and Safety Yoel Roth wrote in one of the messages.
16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.” pic.twitter.com/Vjo6YxYbxT
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Soon after, Musk ad that Twitter is working on creating “a ‘software’ update that will show the true status of your accountso that you know clearly if you have been blocked, the reason and how to appeal”.
- Last Friday, the American tycoon revealed the measures that, according to what he said, the platform took since 2020 to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In his publication, the businessman referred to a thread by journalist and writer Matt Taibbi.
- When the New York Post published the Hunter Biden material, Twitter “took extraordinary measures to suppress the story, deleting links and posting warnings that it could be ‘harmful’”and even blocked its dissemination through direct messages, a tool that until then was only applied to “extreme cases, such as child pornography,” Taibbi said.
