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by gguevaraa 2167 days ago
Here[0] are the supposed pics of the admin panel the hackers accessed. Assuming their legit, it seems like Twitter has some blacklist features. Can't find any info detailing how they exactly work, but it seems an admin can blacklist a user from the trending page or from search results. Pretty interesting.

Oddly enough, posting the screenshots resulted in some users getting their account suspended or Twitter pulling the picture down.

[0]: https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/_uncategorized/15...

2 comments

This could end up being a big deal in the days to come if legitimate. Twitter has made strong public statements that they don't have shadow banning tools[0].

Apparently sworn statements have been made about this.

[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

> You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).

This doesn't seem to contradict what's shown in the screenshot (which only shows blocking from the search and trends page).

To be fair, the linked article states that they do not shadow ban, not that they don’t have the capability/tools to shadow ban.

Also what do people consider as a shadow ban?

- Removing the tweets from people’s feeds, and only showing them if you browse/go to the offending users profile ? (Personally I don’t think this counts as a shadow ban)

- The offending user is the only person who can see their tweets, even if other users look at their profile (This is shadow banning imo)

I'm sure they've publicly spoken about also having search and trending blacklisting, I've heard about it before. So these statements are not incompatible.
Very interesting! Where’d you find this?