One name at the centre of the story about Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” is that of Jay Bhattacharya. A professor at Stanford’s medical school, he rose to prominence as a co-author of the “Great Barrington Declaration”, which opposed Covid lockdown measures. Last week it emerged that Twitter had placed him on a “trends blacklist” to secretly limit the popularity of his tweets. Following that, Elon Musk contacted Professor Bhattacharya, and invited him in to Twitter HQ to discuss the matter — and view the evidence of his censorship for himself.
He spoke exclusively to Freddie Sayers about that visit, what he and Musk discussed, and the wider implications of his suppression by Twitter.
What does being put on the Twitter “trends blacklist” actually mean?
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.
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.
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.
Tell us about how Elon Musk got in touch and invited you to visit Twitter HQ.
So I get a Skype message from a common friend, someone who knows Elon and knows me. And it says, “Jay, I have an early Christmas present for you”. And then I’m on a signal group with Elon. And the first message from Elon is just “Hi”. And then he says, “Can you come this weekend to Twitter headquarters so we can show you your files, we can show you what’s what, what exactly Twitter 1.0 did?”
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