In their latest video, Project Veritas and James O’Keefe publish a report suggesting that Twitter employees downgrade, if not ban altogether, content from a specific viewpoint they don’t agree with. More often than not it is content from a conservative point of view. The practice is known as “shadow banning.”
“One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So, they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it,” a former engineer at Twitter said.
A former content review agent at Twitter, is seen on the video suggesting that this was more than the act of a few employees. Rather the agent says, it’s a part of unwritten rules established by the company.
“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be…I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules. Like, hey, you gotta do it this way. Or something like that. It was never written, it was more said,” the agent says.
Aside from shadow banning, the video seems to suggest that employees at Twitter also hand over personal information with the Department of Justice, especially about the president. “[Twitter is] more than happy to help the Department of Justice with their little [Trump] investigation,” an employee says.
Twitter has denied stifling any content. “We do not shadow ban,” the company simply stated regarding a similar story in the past.