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‘Visibility Filtering’: Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal How Top Execs Misled The Public About ‘Shadow Banning’

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James Lynch Investigative Reporter
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Twitter executives and employees actively engaged in “visibility filtering” to control user visibility and limit what people see on the platform, according to the second chapter of Elon Musk’s so-called “Twitter Files,” released Thursday by journalist Bari Weiss.

Most people call the practice “shadow banning” and it’s “a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told Weiss, a founder and editor of The Free Press and former Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnist.

The tool was used to “suppress what people see to different levels,” the employee continued, according to 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,” a Twitter engineer told Weiss. Two other employees reportedly confirmed the engineer’s statement. (RELATED: Twitter Had Secret ‘Blacklists’ That Suppressed Stanford Doctor, Top Conservatives, Docs Show)

Twitter allegedly had a “Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team” (SRT-GET) tasked with deciding whether to curb the reach of certain users on the platform. The team typically dealt with up to 200 “cases” per day, ostensibly without the users’ knowledge, according to Weiss.

Above the rank-and-file moderators existed a team of senior Twitter executives called the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” (SIP-PES) team, which handled the most politically sensitive decisions, Weiss reported.

The SIP-PES team involved “high follower account, controversial,” cases, an employee told Weiss. For such cases, “there would be no ticket or anything,” according to Weiss.

Executives such as former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, and former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal were part of the SIP-PES team, Weiss reported.

This is a developing story and there will be further updates.