Rock legend Elton John threw a hissy fit after Twitter CEO Elon Musk exposed Twitter’s secret blacklist files last night when he released the ‘Twitter Suppression Files Part Two.’
It is an odd time to leave the social network, right after Musk brings transparency, openness, and free speech back to the platform, but to each his own.
Elton said: “All my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world. I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.
Musk said:
“What is this “misinformation” that he refers to?”
Perhaps Elton was referring to what Twitter used to do as reported by independent journalist Bari Weiss.
Weiss was given access to Twitter’s internal files by Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
What is this “misinformation” that he refers to?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
Bari reported: “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.
“Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
“Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
“Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
“Twitter denied that it does such things. 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.”
“What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
“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 told us.
“VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility.
“It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
“All without users’ knowledge.
“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us.
“Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
“The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day.
“But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper.
“That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.
“This secret group included 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. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
All my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world.
I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.— Elton John (@eltonofficial) December 9, 2022
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
8. “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 told us.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
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