On Thursday, journalist Bari Weiss began tweeting out the second installment of the "Twitter Files," which confirmed that employees at the social media platform did build blacklists and participated in shadow banning for years, despite the public comments of former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey wrote on Twitter in 2018, "A short thread addressing some issues folks are encountering as a result of our conversational health work, specifically the perception of 'shadowbanning' based on content or ideology. It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work."
"We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off)," Dorsey added.
Weiss' reporting shows that Twitter did shadow ban under the moniker of "Visibility Filtering," and tagged users in various ways to execute these bans.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was tagged with a "Do Not Amplify" tag. Talk show host Dan Bongino was tagged with a "Search Blacklist" tag which had a similar suppressive consequence.
Several users have commented on Dorsey's years' old tweet. Tim Young wrote, "Oh see... it wasn't 'shadow banning' because they called it 'visibility filtering,' even though it was the exact same thing."
Some called Dorsey out for lying.
Dorsey linked to an article co-written by former Twitter Head of Legal, Police, and Trust Vijaya Gadde titled "Setting the record straight on shadow banning." In that article she wrote with Twitter co-founder Kayvon Beykpour, "People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, 'what is shadow banning?' The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."
But that is what they did through a manipulation of the algorithm that would cause tweets to trend and become promoted through tags such as "Do Not Amplify" and "Search Blacklist."
The first round of Twitter files confirmed that the social media company censored stories and interfered in American elections, especially centered around the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and Gadde played a key role in that move.Join and support independent free thinkers!
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