What is Twitter Files 2.0: Truth revealed about shadow banning and secret blacklisting on Elon Musk’s platform

Just a few days after Elon Musk supported the release of a major expose on his newly owned social media platform called The Twitter Files, a new part of the revelations named Twitter Files 2.0 was made public by a journalist on the microblogging site.

The second edition of the Twitter Files was released by a journalist named Bari Weiss through a Twitter thread, revealing several “secret” operative methods on the social networking website. Weiss also talked about a practice called “secret blacklisting”.

Making several interesting revelations, the journalist shone a light on a new thing called secret blacklisting and shadow banning through Twitter Files 2.0, which was created by certain Twitter employees to disfavor certain tweets and limit certain activity on the microblogging website.

In one of the tweets, Weiss said, “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.”

Twitter Files 2.0 have made a simple revelation, that the company has been resorting to shadow banning and secret blacklisting to limit certain people and content on Twitter. According to the thread, the Twitter team calls this practice as “visibility filtering”.

THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

Another tweet by Weiss read, “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.”

What is shadow banning and secret blacklisting?

Shadow banning is a practice by Twitter where it can limit the visibility and reach of the content by a specific person, so that it cannot get likes, and retweets and is not visible on the dashboards of the majority of the users, without actually being blocked.

Similarly, secret blacklisting also means limiting the visibility of the content of a specific person in certain areas, without the user having any knowledge about why their content is not getting reached. This is mainly being used for content posted by right-wing leaders, as per Twitter Filed 2.0.

Bari Weiss, explaining the phenomena, wrote, “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.”

READ | Twitter Files Part 1: What inside details were revealed in Elon Musk’s ‘expose’