Earlier this year in October, Elon Musk, a business magnate and investor, acquired Twitter. The process started at the start of the year itself, but it took till October to complete. Since this acquisition, Musk has implemented a number of changes to the app, and the public is clearly not happy. With employee layoffs, termination of remote working, and the hope for absolute free speech on the app, there are a lot of things wrong with this acquisition. There is another aspect that has recently come out, known as Twitter Files. Twitter Files are a set of internal documents of Twitter Inc that are being shared by owner Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss.
Most recently, the second installment of the Twitter Files was released online, and a lot more information was revealed. Reportedly, Baris Weiss said that the teams of Twitter employees build blacklists in order to prevent disfavoured tweets from trending. He also claimed that Twitter employees actively limited the visibility of all the right-wing accounts and even trending topics revolving around the same. This was clearly done without informing users.
This isn’t necessarily news, because Twitter has been accused of the blacklist move multiple times in the past, however, they have always denied it. Twitter also used ‘visibility filtering’ to block searches of individual users, so that the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability could be limited. They blocked select users’ posts from ever appearing on the trending pafe, anf also from the inclusion in hashtag searches.
One of the things Musk was adamant on establishing was free speech on the app, when he said, “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” Musk also declared Twitter’s mission was to become the “most accurate source of information.”
