Elon Musk, who has been the sole owner of Twitter since October 28, started sharing confidential documents for the company with the public last week. Using journalists as a tool in sharing these files, Musk made his second Twitter disclosure today.
The subject of Elon Musk’s second disclosure was the secret bans applied to accounts on Twitter. It turned out that Twitter even implemented the ‘shadow ban’ application, which it had previously denied, even on many famous accounts. Let’s get down to the details.
A separate team has been set up to secretly ban users on Twitter!
The disclosure files, brought to the agenda this week by “The Free Press” founder Bari Weiss, revealed that a separate team has been set up to secretly ban people on Twitter.
This team was responsible for creating blacklists, preventing unpopular Tweets from being listed among trends, and even limiting the visibility of accounts and trends. All these transactions were carried out in secret, without informing anyone.
It was stated that the team in question was named the “Strategic Response Team – Global Upgrade Team (SRT-GET)”. The team was handling more than 200 cases per day.
Senior executives included in the team included Vijaya Gadde (Head of Law, Policy and Trust), Yoel Roth (Head of Global Trust and Security), and former and current CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.
Some examples (Prohibitions applied to individuals are indicated by colored labels)
Arguing that COVID restrictions will harm children, Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been placed on the “Trends Blacklist”. His tweets have been blocked from trending.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s account has been flagged as “Do Not Amplify”. In other words, this account was prevented from being publicized, and it was prevented from reaching large masses.
- Among the accounts that Twitter has secretly banned, there were mostly conservative and right-wing accounts.
But what exactly is this secret ban? Twitter employees explain:
“What many call ‘shadow banning’, Twitter executives and employees refer to as ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF’. Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
A senior Twitter employee explained it this way: Think of visibility filtering as a way to suppress different levels of what people see. This is a very powerful tool.
Two Twitter employees also confirmed: We control visibility quite a bit. We control the magnification of your content (how many people it will reach). And normal people don’t know how much we make.”
In short, shadow banning served as a different kind of censorship.
Musk also made a promise for the future:
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your real account status so you’ll clearly know if you’ve been shadow banned, why, and how to appeal.”
It is currently unknown whether legal authorities will take action regarding Twitter’s past. The next Twitter reveal will be shared via journalist Matt Taibbi in the coming days.
- So what do you think about what was revealed today?
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