“Twitter Files Part 2”: Blacklists, disfavoured tweets and more – Times of India

Weiss starts her 30-tweet thread by explaining what the second part of “Twitter Files” is all about. “A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees 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,” she said.
The journalist explains that even though Twitter’s mission was “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers,” the company did erect some barriers and shadowbanned some on the platform.
What is Twitter shadowbanning?
In a series of posts, Weiss said that Twitter used “shadow banning”. Shadowbanning is a set of restrictions that Twitter used to limit the visibility of tweets posted by far-right users.
She posted a number of screenshots explaining how tweets by various right-wing thinkers were put on the “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do not Amplify” categories which prevented their posts from trending on Twitter.
Twitter calls shadowbanning “Visibility Filtering”
While people refer to this “blacklisting” as shadowbanning, Twitter executives call it “Visibility Filtering” or “VF,” Weiss said, citing “multiple high-level sources.”
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee was quoted as saying.
“VF refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page, and from inclusion in hashtag searches. All without users’ knowledge,” Weiss tweeted.

Twitter denied Shadowbanning in 2018
In 2018, Twitter denied that it does such things, Weiss noted. She again targeted Vijaya Gadde, then Head of Legal Policy and Trust, and Kayvon Beykpour, Head of Product, saying that both executives denied shadowbanning. “And we certainly don’t ‘shadow ban’ based on political viewpoints or ideology,” they said.
Twitter “SIP-PES”
Apart from moderators who used to handle “200 cases” each day, there was another “secret group” called “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES”, Weiss noted.
“This secret group included the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made,” Weiss said.
“Twitter Files Part 3” will be released by Matt Taibbi, Weiss noted.