I mean recent Twitter leaks have shown internal tools that let them categorize users into blacklists and the ability censor their tweets so they dont get much reach or engagement by not showing up in Trending lists and etc. The screenshots of the tools came out during the big hack a year ago that was pushing crypto scams.
And why is that a bad thing? Trending blacklists are a standard moderation tool, basically every social media platform uses them nowadays. Without them, bad actors can game the algorithm to get their spam promoted through the trends system.
The fact that moderation tools exist does not imply that they are being used for political censorship. None of the screenshots of "search blacklisted" accounts from the leak showed any evidence of it being used on actual people, they are all random alphanumeric usernames with more reports than tweets.
In fact, the opposite is true. In 2018, when the feature was first rolled out, it was found to be catching several notable conservative commentators because their tweeting behavior is hard to distinguish from trolls and spambots (wonder why...), so those people were explicitly whitelisted so that they would appear in searches and trends despite their bad behavior.
We quickly went from "Twitter isn't a heavily censored platform" to "they have secret blacklists, but it's totally normal and not political and a good thing anyway". This game of moving goalposts is tiresome and clearly disingenuous.
Twitter is a moderated platform. Tooling for moderating content existing does not inherently imply it is being used for political purposes, but you’re more than welcome to contradict that with sources.
There’s no goalpost moving here - a social media site having the ability to prevent large volumes of spam making its way to the trending page in front of thousands of eyeballs shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The number of crypto scams in replies to tweets by Elon himself suggests that this tooling is definitely not as draconian in ability as you seem to believe.
Your email provider also has “secret” blacklists, and if incoming email originates from a sender on those lists then it gets put in your junk (or even bounced). Does that concern you?
