Twitter Files 2: The 10 big revelations on right-wing users

Part two of Twitter Files is out and independent journalist Bari Weiss has unveiled more "dark" secrets of the social media platform. Weiss claimed that Twitter had a "secret blacklist" before Elon Musk took over the company. And, that "secret blacklist" was made by the employees which suppressed the voices of right-wing commentators. Citing some of the conservative accounts such as talk show host Dan Bongino, and Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Weiss claimed they were targeted for suppression by Twitter. 

Here's what Twitter Files-II reveals: 

1. The former New York Times and Wall Street Journal writer said teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, to prevent disfavored tweets from trending.

2. The independent journalist also claimed that Twitter employees actively limited the visibility of entire right-wing accounts or even trending topics secretly without informing users.

3. Weiss shared a screenshot that showed how Twitter stifled the opinion of Stanford’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya on the Covid-19 lockdown.

4. The journalist also tweeted a screenshot of the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify".

5. Twitter faced similar accusations in the past but then platform always denied it. 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.”

6. Citing sources, Weiss said Twitter executives and staff call this process Visibility Filtering” or “VF".

7. Twitter 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.

8. 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.

9. The 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.

10. 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 Weiss.