(ORDO NEWS) — A new exposé called the “Twitter Files” revealed a number of tools the company’s management used to silence conservatives, including blacklisting and shady blocking. Judging by the revealed information, company employees called shadow blocking “visibility filtering.”
Thursday night’s exposés by former New York Times reporter Barry Weiss revealed that prominent conservative voices from Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino have been affected by “visibility filtering”. At one point, Twitter even blacklisted Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya for suggesting that coronavirus lockdowns would harm children. Reading from Weiss:
“Twitter’s mission once was to enable everyone to create and share ideas and information instantly and without barriers. However, at some point, barriers did appear.
Take, for example, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, who argued that coronavirus lockdowns are bad for children. Twitter secretly blacklisted him, after which his tweets no longer fall into the “popular” section.
Or take the popular conservative talk show host Dan Bongino, who was blacklisted at some point in the search.
And on the profile of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Twitter placed restrictions under the heading “do not distribute”, preventing his popularity.”
As Weiss and a number of conservative observers recalled, Twitter has consistently denied the use of shadow blocking, especially based on “political views or ideology.” Internally, this practice was called “visibility filtering,” PV for short.
According to Weiss, the use of this method was confirmed by “a number of high-level sources.” In particular, it restricts the ability to search for a specific tweet, blocks messages from specific users so that they never end up in the “popular” section, and excludes the ability to search by a hashtag.
“Filtering is a way to influence what users see at different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” said Weiss, one of the company’s senior employees.
“We’re quite active in adjusting visibility. And controlling the distribution of your content. Normal people don’t even realize how much we do,” one anonymous engineer said, with two other Twitter employees confirming his words.
Bari Weiss also talked about the attempts by Twitter management to censor “undesirable” profiles like Libs of TikTok. Recently, former Twitter security chief Joel Roth, who quit after the company was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, defended the controversial decision to disable the profile of the Christian satirical publication The Babylon Bee for calling transgender Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine a male.
“On a number of Twitter profiles, including Libs of TikTok, we have noticed organized campaigns against a vulnerable category of citizens,” Roth told New York magazine editor Kara Swisher.
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