Conservatives believe that an unprecedented hack targeting Twitter has confirmed suspicions that the tech platform is using secret ‘blacklist’ tools to shadowban certain accounts and prevent certain subjects from trending when they do not fit the company’s agenda.
The hack has affected hundreds of prominent accounts, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bil Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa, Apple, Uber, and Jeff Bezos, to name but a few.
Tweets purporting to be from those accounts urged people to send money to a Bitcoin address, with more than $100,000 having been sent at time of writing.
The hack is believed to have originated from a compromised Twitter employee with access to the user management panel.
Effectively, whoever did it was able to hack into a Twitter account that had access to every other Twitter account.
Hearing a lot of unconfirmed rumors a Twitter employee with access to the user management panel was hacked.
— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) July 15, 2020
You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020
LOL cancel EVERYBODYhttps://t.co/CKoToOdpkE
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 15, 2020
Rumor has it that the widespread twitter "hacks" are due to people using third party services on top of twitter for things like scheduling tweets. You can go to settings-> account -> apps and sessions -> then revoke access from all third party apps.
— Ari Paul ⛓️ (@AriDavidPaul) July 15, 2020
While there may be more fallout to come, the most interesting aspect of the hack appears to be the emergence of a partially redacted screenshot purporting to show Twitter’s internal user management panel:
Techies believe that the tool is used to alter ownership of accounts, yet was used by the hackers to gain control of high profile accounts.
The screenshot shows tabs labeled “SEARCH BLACKLIST” and “TRENDS BLACKLIST”.
Conservatives are convinced that this could be evidence that Twitter does indeed have tools to censor what Tweets and topics can be accessed through searches and what tweets appear as trends.
Well there it is. Twitter's internal blacklisting module exposed for everyone to see. Shitstorm is coming.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 16, 2020
Twitters admin panel has a button to “blacklist trends.”
So yeah twitter lied, they manually edit trends. The ones advocating violence are kept up. By their choice.
They aren’t a platform. They are a publisher.
Abolish Section 230.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) July 16, 2020
BREAKING: Alleged leaked pictures from the Twitter admin control panel that was compromised showcase the buttons ‘Trends Blacklist’ and ‘Search Blacklist’, indicating Twitter DOES have the ability to shadowban it’s users.
— Mike Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) July 16, 2020
Twitter has also aggressively targeted accounts reposting the screenshot of the internal panel:
Twitter is banning users for posting a screen shot that exposes all of their lies. https://t.co/VzBp6REr1n
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) July 16, 2020
UPDATE: Twitter is now removing and deleting images of the admin control panel from its website. pic.twitter.com/ljrpvvmNQz
— Mike Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) July 16, 2020
Others noted that Twitter’s use of the word ‘blacklist’ is ironic given that it issued a decree recently saying that it would be banning the term because it offends some people.
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