The second installment of internal Twitter documents were released last night by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. From The Federalist report:
A new batch of internal Twitter communication records released on Thursday confirm the tech giant has been shadowbanning prominent conservative accounts without users’ knowledge for years, despite former CEO Jack Dorsey previously claiming otherwise.
Released by Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press, the new “Twitter Files” reveal the company created blacklists designed to prevent certain accounts or posts from trending. Lists were also built to limit the visibility of accounts or tweets Twitter employees deemed unfavorable.
Among the most notable accounts targeted by the platform were prominent conservative figures such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, with the former’s profile being placed on a “Search Blacklist” and the latter’s being switched to a setting called “Do Not Amplify.” Medical professionals were also censored, with Twitter putting the account of Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” on a “Trends Blacklist,” which “prevented his tweets from trending.”
Commonly known as shadowbanning, the concept of secretly limiting the reach of users’ accounts and posts was referred to by Twitter executives as “visibility filtering.” According to a senior Twitter employee who spoke with Weiss, visibility filtering is “a way for [the company] to suppress what people see to different levels.”
