Before billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, several teams at the social media giant were authorized to read โdirect messagesโ or DMs of users, revealed the second volume of its internal documents released on Friday.
Twitterโs DM feature lets users chat with other account holders on the platform. Officially, the company has so far maintained that no one except for the two accounts exchanging messages could read their online conversation.
The second volume of โTwitter Filesโ also revealed that apart from reading usersโ DMs, some Twitter teams also secretly prepared blacklists, prevented tweets that they did not like from trending, and curtailed the visibility of certain posts and even the entire accounts.
They also prevented certain topics from appearing in Twitter trends.
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTERโS SECRET BLACKLISTS.
โ Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
The second part of โTwitter Filesโ was released by journalist Bari Weiss and was endorsed by CEO Musk who retweeted her post and wrote: โThe Twitter Files, Part Deux!!โ
The social media giant, which once declared its mission of โgiving everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriersโ, targeted conservation accounts on the platform selectively, the investigation revealed.
ALSO READ: Twitter plans update thatโll let users know if theyโve been shadow-banned
โTake, for example, Stanfordโs Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a โTrends Blacklist,โ which prevented his tweets from trending,โ the journalist wrote in a series of tweets.
However, Twitter never admitted to these malpractices.
In a blog written by Twitterโs then legal, policy and trust & safety lead Vijaya Gadde and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour, the company said: โWe do not shadow ban. And we certainly donโt shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.โ
According to the Twitter Files investigation, a Twitter employee admitted that โnormal peopleโ were not aware of these practices. โWe 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,โ a Twitter engineer told the journalist.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October this year, Musk has set out on an ambitious plan to improve transparency in the companyโs operation in order to make it a โpublic town squareโ in the true sense and ensure freedom of speech on the platform.
However, Musk has announced to curtail the reach of โnegativeโ and hateful tweets.
โNew Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You wonโt find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from the rest of the Internet,โ he tweeted last month.
