From the moment that Elon Musk snatched Twitter away from its former owners, Americans felt as though a revolutionary shift would be coming to the powerful communication tool…and boy, were they right.
Musk has pushed ahead with his free-speech-centric slant for Twitter, despite some serious pushback from the liberal left who are hoping to maintain the platform’s longstanding political bias.
Now, just days after releasing a tranche of evidence of anti-conservative censorship affecting the 2020 election, Musk is back at it again with an even more salacious information drop.
A new Twitter Files investigation has revealed the many tools that company executives employed to blacklist and shadowban conservative voices. The thread posted to Elon Musk’s platform reveals that the internal Twitter name for shadowbanning is “visibility filtering.”
Released by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss in yet another lengthy Twitter thread, the revelations on Thursday showed that several mainstream conservative voices, from Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino, were shadowbanned by the social media company under the rubrics of “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” At one point, Twitter even placed Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, under the label “Trends Blacklist” for arguing that coronavirus lockdowns would harm children.
The practice appeared to be frighteningly common.
“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 employee is quoted as having told Weiss.
“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,” said one anonymous engineer, which two other Twitter employees confirmed.
Former Twitter Chief Jack Dorsey has been more than encouraging for Musk, stating this week that he’d like to see the Tesla CEO release everything that he could.
