“Tough Day” at Twitter after a hacker revealed what appears to be a Twitter control panel that allows developers to ‘blacklist’ individuals from the ‘search’ & ‘trends’ functions.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
These revelations come after Jack Dorsey testified to congress over the censorship practices of the social media website. Ted Cruz specifically calls out the “shadow-ban” (The practice of hiding an individuals communications without the individual knowing they are being censored)
Senator @tedcruz on the power of shadowbanning: "That is a degree of power handed to a handful of tech billionaires in California to monitor & police, & put not just a thumb, but all five fingers, a fist & their foot on the scales of political discourse."
pic.twitter.com/ZgfhaKyiIu— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) July 16, 2020
Not only can Twitter developers censor you by secretively hiding your communications, they can also see personal information such as your IP address, which phone service you are using and how many “strikes” your account has accrued.
These revelations shed new light into the censorship practices of the social media giant, vindicating many conservatives in revealing what they have known for some time.