Project Veritas has released a not-so-shocking exposé in which several Twitter engineers are caught on hidden camera admitting to Twitter's widespread censorship tactics. The engineers go into detail about what kind of content they are censoring and how they are doing it.
A former Twitter engineer by the name Abhinav Vandevu gives a quick breakdown of what exactly shadow banning is.
The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don't know they've been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.
Why would Twitter want someone to keep posting on their platform if their content is inappropriate? And more importantly, what kind of content does Twitter deem inappropriate enough to shadow ban?
Pranay Singh, a current Twitter engineer, unwittingly offers us some insight into what kind of content Twitter deems bannable.
You look for Trump, or America, or any of like five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck. And then you look and you, like, parse all the messages, all like the pictures, and then you look for, like, stuff that matches, like, that stuff.
So this is where things get really interesting. What Singh is describing here is the systematic and algorithmic banning of anyone with a conservative or patriotic political stance. This systematic censorship is compounded by the fact that Twitter isn't informing the user that their content, or account, has been hidden.
By not informing users that their content has been hidden, Twitter is attempting to psychologically manipulate their users. Their goal seems to be to use pavlovian techniques to trick their users into only posting content that agrees with Twitter's far left political stance.
Of course, few Steemians will be shocked by this report. Many of us have gravitated to Steem and other decentralized platforms in order to avoid this exact type of censorship. I for one have always hated Twitter and have refused to use a platform with such a ridiculous name since the beginning.
Watch the report from Project Veritas below.
What are your thoughts on the recent exposure of Twitter's censoring tactics? Will you continue to use Twitter in spite of their intentional manipulation of public opinion? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading.
