1. Twitter distorted the conversation and misled the public.
Twitter had a system of "whitelists" that allowed its algorithms and human moderators to turn engagement dials up and down based on what a user said. It used this power to limit the ability of certain groups and individuals to reach an audience, including conservative commentator Dan Bongino, Stanford economist and medical school professor Jay Bhattacharya, mRNA vaccine critic Alex Berenson, and the Libs of TikTok account.
The company regularly tap-danced around the meaning of "shadowbanning" to maintain plausible deniability. In a 2018 blog post, Twitter's Trust and Safety team wrote, "We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile)."
Needless to say, making Tweets so hard to find that digging through someone's profile is the only way to unearth them is what's commonly known as "shadow banning," or, as Twitter employees termed it with an Orwellian flair, "visibility filtering."
The Twitter Files show that company staff became increasingly comfortable using these tools to manage the flow of information and political discourse around the 2020 election, regularly deploying filters to limit the visibility of Trump's tweets and many others pertaining to election results in the weeks preceding the January 6 riot and the decision to evict the president from the platform.
2. The government is secretly policing speech.
3. Twitter permitted covert state propaganda on its platform.
reason.com
Twitter had a system of "whitelists" that allowed its algorithms and human moderators to turn engagement dials up and down based on what a user said. It used this power to limit the ability of certain groups and individuals to reach an audience, including conservative commentator Dan Bongino, Stanford economist and medical school professor Jay Bhattacharya, mRNA vaccine critic Alex Berenson, and the Libs of TikTok account.
The company regularly tap-danced around the meaning of "shadowbanning" to maintain plausible deniability. In a 2018 blog post, Twitter's Trust and Safety team wrote, "We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile)."
Needless to say, making Tweets so hard to find that digging through someone's profile is the only way to unearth them is what's commonly known as "shadow banning," or, as Twitter employees termed it with an Orwellian flair, "visibility filtering."
The Twitter Files show that company staff became increasingly comfortable using these tools to manage the flow of information and political discourse around the 2020 election, regularly deploying filters to limit the visibility of Trump's tweets and many others pertaining to election results in the weeks preceding the January 6 riot and the decision to evict the president from the platform.
2. The government is secretly policing speech.
3. Twitter permitted covert state propaganda on its platform.
Did 'every conspiracy theory' about Twitter turn out to be true?
The internal company documents offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the federal agencies distorted the public debate one of the world's largest social media platforms.
reason.com