Journalist Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press and former Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnist, launched the second chapter in Elon Musk’s so-called “Twitter Files” Thursday evening, focusing on the ways in which Twitter employees “blacklisted” and otherwise limited the spread of users’ tweets.
Weiss tweeted what appeared to be a photo of Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy, with his account being prominently marked as being under a “Trends Blacklist.” Bhattacharya was secretly blacklisted because he “argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children,” and was thus unable to trend on the platform, according to Weiss.
In addition to Bhattacharya, Twitter placed Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk under a “Do Not Amplify” notice, while right wing talk radio personality Dan Bongino, who has appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, was placed under a “Search Blacklist,” according to Weiss. The practice of limiting the access or reach of users’ content, commonly referred to as “shadow banning,” is something that Twitter has denied doing in the past, and is referred to internally as “Visibility Filtering” or “VF,” Weiss reported.
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” a senior Twitter employee reportedly told Weiss.
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Weiss’ thread arrives six days after Matt Taibbi, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, launched “Part One” of Musk’s Twitter Files, focusing primarily on the mechanisms by which various high-level executives at twitter coordinated to suppress the spread of a New York Post article detailing a laptop owned by Hunter Biden.
While Musk had initially tweeted on Dec. 2 that the second installment of the files would be released on Dec. 3, a date that he then pushed back “another day or so,” before going silent on the issue.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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