Twitter Files 2: Right Wing Users Big Revelations Galore

twitter-files

The Twitter Files, as shown by Taibbi, is a series of emails available as screenshots. These images show internal discussions carried out for censoring the story about Hunter Biden on the microblogging platform. In Twitter Files 1, the story was reported by the New York Post, and it claimed the business activities of Hunter Biden in Ukraine. Some claims suggest that Hunter Biden also made his father meet some people occasionally; however, a few points were unclear. 

The internal email screenshots have come to light now, but during that time, the microblogging site had put forward the argument that it had not complied with the “hacked material” policy, and as such, the story was censored. 

Part Two of the Twitter Files is already circulating, and journalist Bari Weiss has revealed more dark secrets. As far as Twitter Files 2 is concerned, let us understand the facts in the following points-

Fast facts related to Twitter Files 

Check out the facts in a nutshell.

  1. The former Wall Street and New York Times journal writer stated that groups or teams of employees on Twitter draw up blacklists so disfavored tweets could be prevented from trending. 
  2. There are claims from independent journalists that Twitter employees used to limit the visibility of the accounts belonging to the entire right-wing members and also trending topics secretly without feeling the need to inform the users. 
  3. In one such instance, Weiss revealed a screenshot of how Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford’s opinion on the Covid-19 lockdown was stifled. 
  4. There were also tweets from the same journalist that showed screenshots of the right-wing talk show host Dan Bongino who was included in the “Search Blacklist” category. 
  5. Similarly, the account of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, was set to the “Do Not Amplify” category by Twitter. 
  6. Many times in the past, the microblogging site faced similar accusations, once in 2018 as well, but at that time, the Head of Legal Policy and Trust Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde, along with the Head of Product Kayvon Beykpour refused the same and instead said that they do not shadow any ban. Also adding, they said they had not shadowed the ban based on political viewpoints and ideology. 
  7. Naming sources, Weiss revealed that executives of Twitter and the staff call the process “VF” or “Visibility Filtering.” 
  8. The microblogging platform has used VF for blocking the searches of independent and individual users, limiting the scope of a single tweet from being discovered, blocking posts from appearing of select users, and being seen on the “trending” page and from the hashtag inclusions. 
  9. The main group responsible for deciding whether there must be a limit to the reach of specific account holders was decided upon by the so-called Strategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team, also known as SRT-GET. This group was responsible for handling up to 200 such cases daily. 
  10. The secret group had staff belonging to the inner circle, including the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust-Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust & Safety- Yoel Roth, and subsequent Chief Executive Officers Parag Agrawal and Jack Dorsey, among others. 

Weiss said on Twitter that one of the engineers spoke to him, saying that they control visibility quite a bit and amplify content a bit as well. But normal users are not aware of how much control they exercise. 

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