By Libby Emmons
Published December 9, 2022
Elon Musk confirmed early Friday morning that under previous leadership at Twitter, political candidates were blacklisted, prevented from having their content amplified on the platform. Twitter executives testified before Congress in 2018 and said unequivocally that they did not engage in this kind of suppression.
This admission from Musk comes after Bari Weiss dropped the second batch of Twitter Files, which revealed that "teams of Twitter employees" did build blacklists, which they used to stifle those users whose content they did not want to see trending or amplified on Twitter. Weiss did not list political candidates among those who she said were shadow banned, but the list is not complete.
Musk was responding to a question from Ian Miles Cheong, who asked both Musk and Weiss: "were any political candidates — either in the US or elsewhere — subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?"
"Yes," came the reply from Musk.
Head of Legal Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Head of Product Kayvon Beykpour, and former CEO Jack Dorsey all said outright in 2018 that Twitter did not suppress users based on political views.
"To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets," Beykpour said.
"We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off)," Dorsey said. He also noted "have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work," in response to perceptions of shadowbanning practices.
"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," Weiss wrote.
Read more: ThePostMillennial.com
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