Twitter continues to deny shadow-banning on it's platform, despite recently being caught tampering with politic visibility on content on it's platform, hiding conservative profiles from being visible in search results.
Twitter's legal/policy lead Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour recently defended Twitter and the non-shadow-banning claim by playing word games. Then they admitted they essentially do shadow ban:
People are asking us if we shadowban. We do not. But let’s start with, “what is shadow banning?”
The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.
We do not shadow ban. 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). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
So, because they define shadow banning as content that is not able to be seen other than by the person who posted it themselves, anything they do to make content harder to discover isn't shadow banning... Give me a break!
They admit they employ methods that render following people for the their content useless. Saying you have to work to find content, when you were supposed to be getting it because you already followed someone to get their content, is a shadow ban of making someone's content less visible less discoverable.
Having to go directly to someone's profile to get their content makes following people pointless, and that much harder to even get to. WHo is actually going to go verify all the people they follow to make sure they are getting the content? What a waste of time!
How would you even know they have put out content for you to go see? Are you going to go check up on 500 people each day to see if they posted something? NO! That's the whole point of a follow feature so that you don't have to do that! Why have a follow "feature" that doesn't work, that doesn't have people's posts/tweets pop up on your feed for you to see?
Anyways, Twitter employees have already been caught on camera admitting they try "to get shitty people to not show up"
HIDDEN CAMERA: Twitter Engineers To "Ban a Way of Talking" Through "Shadow Banning"
They talk about how the aforementioned definition of shadow baning used to be in place, although it may not anymore. This was back in January 2018. But just because someone's posts aren't being seen despite being able to post (the "official" shadow banning definition Gadde and Beykpour gave), doesn't mean Twitter hasn't changed things up to bring in a different level of shadow banning, as they have done and have been caught doing to conservative personalities.
Twitter policies and algorithms are admittedly used to promote a political agenda, which is anti-conservative, and as such also anti-libertarian considering how it it's perceived to be towards the Right.
Instead of the more severe shadow banning, the covert form is what which has been uncovered recently, which is to downrank conservative voices which upranks liberals. This was mentioned in December 2017 as being in development. Now it's been proven to be in effect.
What Twitter is doing could be a form of Federal election tampering. of Congress. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. thinks what Twitter is doing is a campaign finance violation because conservative are being treated differently on Twitter which affects donations they can receive:
"The evidence is piling up that I am being treated differently on Twitter than people on the political Left and I don't like that because I enjoy the Twitter platform, I enjoy the engagement, I enjoy the candor. So, I believe that Twitter may have illegally donated to the campaigns of my opponents by prejudicing against my content."
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
References:
- Twitter Tampering: Up-Ranking Liberals by Shadow-Banning Conservatives Like They Do With Racists
- Twitter in total DENIAL about its shadow banning of conservatives
- Rep. Matt Gaetz going after Twitter with FEC complaint for ‘shadow banning’ conservatives
- In Bizarre Response, Twitter Tells Trump It Does Not "Shadowban" While Admitting It Does
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