5 things to know about the first 2 installments of the 'Twitter Files'

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Monday, December 12, 2022

4. Twitter limited the reach of certain accounts through 'shadow banning' despite claiming otherwise.

Bari Weiss, a former New York Times reporter and founder of The Free Press, published the second installment of the "Twitter Files" Thursday. The primary focus of Weiss' Twitter thread illustrated an effort to "build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users."

Weiss listed examples of Twitter users who have found themselves subject to a blacklist, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an outspoken critic of coronavirus lockdowns who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration deriding such policies as harmful and ineffective; Fox News host Dan Bongino; and Turning Point USA founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

"Twitter denied that it does such things," Weiss wrote. "In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: 'We do not shadow ban.' They added: 'And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.'"

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7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

Behind the scenes, however, Twitter officials admitted to "visibility filtering," their preferred synonym for "shadow banning." Weiss detailed a conversation with a senior Twitter employee who characterized "visibility filtering" as "a very powerful tool" enabling the platform to "suppress what people to see to different levels."

The practice of "visibility filtering" consists of efforts to "block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet's discoverability; to block users' posts from ever appearing on the 'trending' page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches."

"We control visibility quite a bit," a Twitter engineer acknowledged to Weiss. "We control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do."