(PM.) The second round of Twitter Files revealed that the social media giant had actively blacklisted conservative commentators such as Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino. Yet the company claimed in 2020 that it had banned the term “blacklist.”
In July 2020, during the riots that followed in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Twitter had pledged to use more inclusive language in its programming code, and vowed to drop terms like “master,” “slave,” “whitelist” and “blacklist.”
The company’s engineering team claimed at the time that the platform had begun phasing out potentially-offensive terms that are often used in computer programming, and replaced them with what they considered more socially acceptable language.
This is despite the terms referring to computer terminology. For example, “master” in the community refers to the main version of a piece of code, while “slave” is used to describe the code it controls.
“Blacklist” refers to code that is not allowed and “whitelist” describes code that is approved for use.
In the posts, the social media giant claimed that it would “use leader/follower instead of “master” or “slave” while “whitelist” would be referred to as “allowlist” and “blacklist” would be designated “denylist.”
According to a screenshot of flagged terms, Twitter also removed other “potentially-offensive” words, including “sanity check,” “man-hours,” and “dummy value.”
Twitter posted at the time, “inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs. The language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that.”
“There is no switch we can flip to make these changes everywhere, at once. We will continue to iterate on this work and want to put in place processes and systems that will allow us to apply these changes at scale. Words matter in our meetings, our conversations, and the documents we write. We know there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re committed to doing our part.”
At the time the move was hailed by other tech companies.
Remember when Twitter claimed they were censoring the term “blacklists” even while they were literally labeling people they disagreed with the term “blacklist” https://t.co/KlPXcE41Zl
— Ari Hoffman (@thehoffather) December 9, 2022
It turns out, the pledge was an empty promise and purely virtue signaling.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Independent journalist Bari Weiss revealed on Thursday night that conservative commentators such as Don Bongino had been labeled with a “Search Blacklist” tag, which effectively made them invisible, despite having no strikes.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
