Despite Elon Musk's recent claims of supposedly being for Free Speech and restoring said policy to Twitter, yet another example of this being a lie has surfaced.
Jack Sweeney is the fellow who created the Twitter account @elonjet, which tracks the comings and goings of Musk's private jet. He recently tweeted about how that account has been squashed by Twitter and he's got proof, thanks to some of the whistleblowers inside of the company:
Screenshots show Ella Irwin VP at Twitter Trust and Safety requesting elonjet to have heavy VF (visibility filtering) pic.twitter.com/ehHJpo4zQR
— Jack Sweeney (@JxckSweeney) December 11, 2022
From a report at the Daily Beast:
Internal company messages shared with Sweeney by an “anonymous Twitter employee” reflected that the @elonjet account had been “visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree” beginning Dec. 2. A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”
“VF” stands for “visibility filtering,” a means of blacklisting or shadow-banning certain accounts and shielding their content from other users. That the term is used by Twitter employees internally was first reported by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss on Thursday.
In a thread on the subject, Weiss said a “senior Twitter employee” had told her, “‘Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.’”
The article goes on to say that Musk had tried to give Sweeney an insultingly low $5,000 to delete the account. Well, Musk did finally effectively muffle the account greatly. And it only cost him $44 billion dollars, not mentioning the amount he lost by alienating so many advertisers and users.
