Twitter earlier blacklisted Indian-origin professor: "Twitter Files 2"

New York: After an Indian-origin Stanford University professor said that Covid lockdowns would harm children, Twitter blacklisted him, IANS reported.

Jay Bhattacharya, the professor, was put on a "Trends Blacklist", Twitter internal documents have revealed.

The revelation was made by the second instalment of "Twitter Files", released by journalist Bari Weiss on her social media platform. She is backed by the new Twitter CEO, Elon Musk.

Weiss shared a screenshot on her Twitter, showing Bhattacharya's account marked as having a "recent abuse strike" and as being on a "trends blacklist".

She wrote her post on the platform, "...Take, for example, Stanford's Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a "Trends Blacklist", which prevented his tweets from trending."

She further said, "Investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavoured tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics -- all in secret, without informing users."

"This secret group included the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others," she said in a tweet thread.

In 2018, Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour, Head of Product, said, "We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."

Following Weiss' revelations, Bhattacharya wrote on Twitter: "Still trying to process my emotions on learning that @twitter blacklisted me. The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt."

"I'm curious about what role the government played in Twitter's suppression of covid policy discussion. We will see with time, I suppose," Bhattacharya said in an earlier tweet.

Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey had challenged Musk to stop creating a sensation around the 'Twitter Files' and make everything public instead "without filter". "Twitter Files 2" comes after this.

Last week, Musk released the 'The Twitter Files', episode 1, into the controversial decision to suppress Hunter Biden's laptop story on the platform.