Censored Scientists? (Part 2)

Continuation of conversation with Robert Kogon: Jay Bhattacharya's placement on a Twitter Blacklist

Part 1 of my conversation with Robert Kogon on X focused on whether the Great Barrington Declaration scientists were censored and can be found here:

Censored scientists? (Part 1)

The conversation continued in the comments for the above article, with Kogon probing my claim that Bhattacharya’s Twitter account and his placement on the “trends blacklist” occurred on the same day.

Our exchange is reproduced below, edited slightly, links inserted.

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Kogon: I didn’t know that Jay’s “trends blacklist” hit the day his Twitter account was launched. May I ask you how we know that? Is that what Bari Weiss claims in the “Twitter Files”? I believe the only evidence that we have that Jay was on a “trends blacklist” is a screenshot that Weiss posted. Again, I may be wrong about this and would be happy to be corrected.

But if this is correct and it is Weiss who claims that the blacklist hit the day of the launch, then I would draw a different conclusion than yours: i.e. that the whole story is bogus. That’s through no fault of Jay. He would presumably just believe whatever Musk et al told him. But it doesn’t make sense.

Hockett: No, Weiss does not claim that there. Let me retrace my steps and get back to you. I could be mistaken and will correct if needed! Here’s one “mainstream” writer that called out the Twitter Files and Musk pretty well at the time https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-files-elon-musk-shadowbanning-censorship/

Hockett: In his essay The Government Censored Me and Other Scientists. We are Winning the Battle as We Head to the Supreme Court, published on The Free Press and The Illusion of Consensus, Jay Bhattacharya said,

“As The Free Press revealed in its Twitter Files reporting, in 2021 Twitter blacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration.”

He doesn’t place the post in a month or year, but his account was created in mid-August. This appears to be the first GBD posting, on Aug 23, 2021; there were others afterward:

In What I Learned From Twitter HQ — another Illusion of Consensus post, reformatted as an Q&A from an UnHerd article — Bhattacharya is more specific:

Q: What does being put on the Twitter “trends blacklist” actually mean?

JB: What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages. So I’m talking to my group, and I think everything’s fine, but my messages have an upper limit on how far and wide they go.

Q: And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.

JB: That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.

Kogon: Thanks for that.

Well, that sounds like it is indeed just what Musk et al told him. There’s no documentary evidence that this ever happened, and, as we are agreed and your previous commentator pointed out, screen caps showing the “trends blacklist” option activated on Jay’s account certainly do not constitute documentary evidence.

Those screen caps must have been taken when the “Twitter Files” were being “created” (ambiguity here intended), not when the blacklist option was allegedly active in 2021 and 2022.

In any case, what Jay describes here as a “trends blacklist” is not, on my understanding, what a “trends blacklist” is. What Jay describes is basically a full-blown shadowban. Your followers can see you, non-followers cannot. Obviously, there is no way you can gather hundreds of thousands of followers, as Jay did, with a full-blown shadowban on your account.

A “trends blacklist,” afaik, simply means that even if your post is trending, i.e. generating substantial engagement and views, it will not appear in the “trending” column or page. I’m not sure if the latter still exists, but it did once upon a time and would thus give an extra boost to content that was *already* trending.

This is how a “trend blacklist” is described in this pre-Twitter-File, pre-Musk-acquisition article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/twitter-blacklists-lead-the-company-into-another-trump-supporter-conspiracy/ - and I believe that is correct.

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