The following article, 'Twitter Files 2' Exposes Shadowbanning, Censorship of Conservatives, was first published on Flag And Cross.
It’s plausible that America just knew it all along but didn’t want to admit it. It feels almost preordained. It’s as if we simply chose to ignore the fact that Twitter was censoring and shadowbanning conservative voices on the platfor.
But now, thanks to the detective work of the platform’s new owner Elon Musk, we’re getting a rather extraordinary peek behind the curtain.
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 hypocrisy was stunning.
As Weiss and multiple conservative commenters pointed out, Twitter routinely denied shadowbanning voices, especially based on “political viewpoints or ideology.” While shadowbanning might not be the term that Twitter employed, the company still performed the censorial practice under the banner of “Visibility Filtering or “VF.” According to Weiss, “multiple high-level sources confirmed that “Visibility Filtering” took place.
“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.
Elon Musk has promised to bring a great deal of transparency to Twitter, as well as promote an ethos of free speech on the platform – a directive that hasn’t exactly sat well with the Democratic Party.
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