Twitter has created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific tweets and topics from trending, or limit the visibility of entire accounts without users\u2019 knowledge, according to internal correspondence and interviews with multiple high-level sources within the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite repeated public assurances by top Twitter officials that the company does not \u201cshadow ban\u201d<\/em> users, especially not \u201cbased on political viewpoints or ideology,\u201d<\/em> the practice actually existed under the euphemism of \u201cvisibility filtering,\u201d<\/em> according to journalist Bari Weiss, who published<\/a> the second installment of the so-called \u2018<\/strong>Twitter Files\u2019<\/strong> in a lengthy thread on Thursday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThink about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It\u2019s a very powerful tool,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0one senior Twitter employee said, while another admitted that\u00a0\u201cnormal people do not know how much we do.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n