The “Twitter files” have been shared online by an independent journalist Bari Weiss. Elon Musk aided this declaration of Twitter Files which claimed that it will reveal details about the “shadow ban” policy as it was a hot topic of discussion among social media people.
The thread stated that some teams were working to reduce the visibility and reach of some particular pro-right-wing accounts in the United States.
But the thread that claimed to be working to reduce visibility and reach does not actually reveal anything new.
Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s former head of product also replied to the thread that the micro-blogging company never “shadow-banned” anyone but they only “de-amplified” certain tweets which were known. He also named it “manufacturing drama” in another response.
Bari Weiss shared the Twitter Files and said in a series of tweets “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 once had a mission to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected,” she added.
Weiss also claimed that employees and executives also used power tools like “VF or Visibility Filtering” to disable the searches of many users, limit the scope of the discovery of a particular tweet, bar users’ posts from coming on trending and also from inclusions in hashtag searches of right-wing accounts.
Elon also replied about the Twitter Files later agreeing with Weiss saying, “As @bariweiss clearly describes, the rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left.”
Keyvon Beykpour replied, “We never denied de-amplifying things. In fact, we made clear that we do rank. We defined exactly what we meant by “shadow banning” (b/c there are many definitions) and made very clear that we didn’t do *that*.”
He added that “characterizing any de-amplification as equating to shadow banning which is either a lazy interpretation or deliberately misleading.” He also quoted tweeted one of Elon Musk’s earlier tweets on the issue saying, “De-amplification is obviously necessary and even Elon himself believes so.”
About the policies, Beykpour refused that he and other executives had lied and stated that a lot of this was ‘manufacturing drama’
As Shadow banning is a popularly debated topic on Twitter, the term means if an account is shadowbanned then that account’s posts and comments will be suspended from being visible to others without even their knowledge.
If Twitter de-amplified the user’s tweet then it would not show up in the feed but rather the user would see the post by going to their profile as per the blog post of 2018.
Meanwhile, it seems like Musk plans to handle this by showing ‘true account status’ to users.’
He wrote, “Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal.”
