Purported Internal Screenshots Reveal Twitter Has a ‘Search Blacklist’ and ‘Trends Blacklist’

Twitter has “search blacklist” and “trends blacklist” tags on accounts, according to a purported image of an internal tool used by employees to moderate users, released via the blockbuster hack of prominent individuals yesterday.

Hackers gained access to a Twitter employee’s account yesterday, reportedly bribing the employee $2,000 for his account according to a report by Vice. The employee account was then used to gain posting access to the accounts of a number of prominent individuals, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others. The accounts were then used to push a Bitcoin scam on their followers.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the hack was a result of “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

Vice was able to obtain a screenshot of the internal tool used by the compromised Twitter employee’s account to access the users’ profiles. The console includes two tags that can apparently be applied to user accounts, “search blacklist” and “trends blacklist.”