Twitter compiled “secret blacklists” and developed a covert operation to reduce the visibility of tweets, accounts and topics, revealed the second part of the “Twitter Archives” investigation published on the social network and explained by the magazine Forbes🇧🇷 According to Barry Weiss, a former journalist for the North American edition, the platform will have groups of employees involved in creating blacklists to prevent certain tweets from becoming a trend and limiting the visibility of accounts or topics.
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The operation was launched “without the knowledge of users,” said Barry Weiss, a former conservative commentator who, along with journalist Matt Taibbi, obtained access to Twitter internal documents from the hands of Elon Musk.
Blacklisted accounts include Stanford University health policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, conservatives Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and “Libs of TikTok,” an influential and controversial account that shares right-wing radical views. The reasons why the accounts were attacked are unknown, and it has not been established whether the restricted users violated any rules. According to Barry Weiss, the Strategic Response Team (as it is called) often handled up to 200 cases a day.
Politically sensitive decisions – a category that included “Libs of TikTok” – were transferred to another team, the social network’s integrity policy, made up of senior executives such as executive presidents Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.
Badi Weiss defined Twitter’s undercover operation as “heinous acts of censorship” and compared it to the moderation policy announced by Musk for Twitter, which would have “freedom of expression, but not freedom of reach.” The journalist used the term “shadowban” [“proibição oculta”]and the social network rejected the designation, arguing that the tweets didn’t stop being visible, they just got smaller in reach.
Following the release of the second part of the Twitter files, Musk said he was working on a software update that would show users who were restricted the reason for the restriction and a way to appeal the decision. According to Elon Musk, tweets, like videos, will also be tracked in the view count for several weeks.
In response to a question on Twitter, Musk acknowledged that during the election campaign there were political candidates who were subject to visibility restrictions. However, the businessman did not mention exactly which politicians were targeted, whether they were Americans or immigrants from another country.
The first wave of Twitter archives, released in early December, revealed Twitter’s attempts to silence an October 2020 New York Post article that mentioned links between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Ukrainian energy company that paid money to a Democrat’s son. , Hunter Biden. The disclosure of internal documents is part of Musk’s overhaul of Twitter to ensure freedom of expression.
