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So, uh, the latest Twitter Files just dropped. This one is about Trump and his removal.
Taibbi claims the following.
Twitter post-Trump-ban was now willing to carry forward a policy of "the president can be banned" no matter what.
At least 1 executive did not consider Trump's tweets in isolation i.e they considered the context surrounding the man, his policies, and supporters as well, and they were discussing this with Gadde.
Trust and Safety team members were meeting with the FBI and DHS regularly during this time period.
Twitter was actively engaging in fact-checking against some class of tweets (the particular example is whether Trump's claim about a rigged election would count as a violation if the supporting facts were wrong).
Twitter was aware that they would not necessarily look good if it came out that they were partnering with the FBI/DHS to evaluate misinformation.
In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias. Nothing new was revealed, which is now an argument many are using to claim that this is all a waste of time.
I'm totally down to believe that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi had to post their reveals on Twitter, but the theatrical nature of the reveals is, in my opinion, actively hurting whatever points they want to make. The discussions are increasingly becoming about how the information is being handled over what, if anything, is being shown to us.
Huh? Maybe in the "it's not happening, and if it is, it's a good thing" sense. Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true). Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?
What's your definition of "shadow-ban"?
According to urbandictionary
And according to Twitter
So, what accounts is it alleged Twitter shadow banned, according to either its own or the pre-Twitter-Files definition? As far as I can tell the actions Twitter is alleged to have taken are:
De-boosted some accounts such that their content would not appear in one's timeline, but could still be viewed if they went to the posting account directly (i.e. not shadow banned) and;
Hid some accounts from auto complete in the search bar, but which could still be viewed if one navigated directly to the posting account (i.e. not shadow banning).
As far as I can tell this new post-Twitter-Files definition of shadow banning as any kind of limit of an accounts reach is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming Twitter lied about not shadow banning people (in the same blog post where they are extremely clear about what they mean by shadow banning).
The term "shadowban" was invented in the context of phpbb-style single-thread forums, which were usually fairly low-traffic. The visibility of the specific post in a specific thread is very binary there - either you see it in the correct position, or you don't. So Shadowbanning there is a simple concept with a specific meaning.
Twitter works very differently in that it's theoretically a flat system and every tweet by every user is at the same level. Time is the only natural thing to filter by, but even that doesn't really work that well - if you follow 10 people, you probably don't really want the one that tweets once a day to be effectively invisible due to being drowned out by the one who tweets every 10 minutes. There always has to be some sort of algorithm in place to determine which order tweets show up in. A strict "shadowban" meaning your tweets never show up outside of viewing your timeline would be easy, but also very obvious. But when you have an unknown and unaccountable algorithm deciding whose tweets are seen when by who, it's equally easy to make any tweet show up less or lower for any reason you feel like. If your tweet gets 10% of the engagement you would have expected, well who's to say whether it just wasn't a very good tweet, or it was artificially deboosted?
Shadowban is a popular term for the concept, but the literal meaning isn't very useful when it comes to representing how Twitter actually works. It seems like a motte and bailey situation. One side could say Twitter doesn't shadowban because they never actually do the exact literal meaning. The other side can say that artificially suppressing the reach of a tweet in more subtle ways may technically not be the literal meaning, but it's the same idea, and they need a word to express it that is understandable and has some punch to it.
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This is completely false, shadowbanning has been for used for many years to refer to any kind of ban or hiding of someone's posts that is hidden from the shadowbanned user even if they are still possible to access to some degree. The website everyone used to check if they were shadowbanned on Twitter was shadowban.eu, which specifically checked for "Search Suggestion Ban", "Search Ban", "Ghost Ban", "Reply Deboosting" and (until it was deprecated) "Quality Filter Discrimination". Today other websites like this one also use the term shadowban for the same methods.
Nobody tweeting about how they were shadowbanned was claiming that their tweets were completely invisible - obviously so, since there would be no point in tweeting about it and everyone would have already noticed. Reddit-style complete shadowbans are trivial to see by just looking at your own posts with an incognito window or TOR, and on Twitter would be immediately noticed for anyone with followers, making them a much less effective form of shadowbanning. Reddit's shadowban system was originally designed for use against spambots, while Twitter's was designed for use against humans.
EDIT: Also this is the opening of the Wikipedia article which calls Twitter shadowbanning a conspiracy theory:
The "less prominent" part has been in the article since 2017, since before the "conspiracy theory" part.
I appreciate the links! It seems more people did refer to Twitter's actions as "shadow-banning" than I was aware of, even if Twitter itself did not.
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The second one you quoted is fine, with the caveat that it doesn't have to be undiscoverable to everyone.
And as far as I can tell, insisting that to meet the definition of "shadow-banning" content has to be made 100% undiscoverable is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming twitter hasn't lied about shadow banning people.
I agree. Twitter does shadowban and has lied about it. They have multiple degrees of shadow banning, but it exists. They are not going to say they do, but it has the same outcome.
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I think this is just a new halfway measure that didn't have a specific term. Would anyone be unhappy with calling this as "partial shadowban" or something like that?
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I disagree. I've been around the web for a middling long time. Been banned and shadow banned and so on... rather often in my teenage years. I still kept getting banned well into my thirties.
Honestly I forgot how many times I got permabanned from somewhere. I mean, when you find out you can make dignified, reasonable Americans absolutely lose their temper and go ape by posting at them about 13/50, twin studies and race and IQ, it gets rather tempting to do so. (the psychological reasons why I did so are rather clear in hindsight)
Got several months-long bans on SSC and motte. So, I have extensive experience with being on the wrong end of moderation.
A shadow ban is that you and only you can see what you post. This has been, unless my memory is fake, the understood definition for at least a decade if not more.
If you're logged out you can't see what you post.
It's relatively trivial to spot - you get zero interaction, you log into Tor and you can't see yourself.
You could do a search and this is what would come up. Reddit does it to content it doesn't like. I've ran into it numerous times while posting on the old motte about Reddit policy team being composed of very spooky people.
So, technically, twitter isn't shadow banning.
Perhaps we could use the term 'throttling' here?
In practice, having all your responses being hidden under "more replies", having a search suggestion ban means, that only people who follow you or who are very thorough will see your content or replies.
It's not as strong as a shadow ban, but it definitely limits your reach and influence. It is Twitter putting its thumb on the scale under the banner of 'fighting hate'.
It was also something most right wing accounts I followed were subject to. People like Nick Land, 0hp Lovecraft (still has a search suggestion ban), Steve Sailer etc.
Unless you followed them, you'd have a hard time seeing their activity.
Very easy to be banned on reddit subs. Not even race/HBD stuff. Just ideological disagreement.
True, however, in my twenties I often got banned for simply just being too spicy or just too unhinged. I'm not the world's most reasonable person once I get going, and especially if caffeine and alcohol are involved.
I generally avoid combining the two, as it's very likely I come up with what they call a 'powerful take' and if you do that on a US libertarian forum, you're out.
E.g. that "ackshually, some amount of misogyny is good because a healthy dose of it counteracts the women-are-wonderful effect and thus cuts down on harmful, manipulative behavior of women, thus enhancing societal health".
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See my post above, more subtle forms of shadowbanning like Twitter uses have been called "shadowbans" for many years. Including by the shadowban.eu site that everyone used to check.
I did a search and all 3 of those accounts used the term "shadowban" that way years ago:
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/934264497639899136
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1184531291741577217
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1588375202953854976
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1192976470802460673
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1311276706553094146
People on Twitter talking about shadowbanning were referring to the Twitter form of shadowbanning, not the too-obvious Reddit method.
Twitter has something like 5 levels of shadowbaning. The worst is being totally ghosted on the site. Or having all your comments be hidden in 'show more' , or search result ban. Most people who think they are shadowbanned are not , but rather think they are because their tweets seem to be getting less engagement. but this can be due to many reasons, such as posting links or hashtags or embedded tweets instead of text/pictures, which do the best. Tweets with links are throttled compared to plain text, video, or pictures.
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I agree. However:
But that's the linguistic ambiguity the censorious are exploiting. We should perhaps rectify it ?
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I don't understand how the requirement to be undiscoverable to "everyone" is being invented. The word "everyone" is right there in the definition Twitter gave of what it considered shadow banning back in 2018. Now, maybe your own definition has never had "everyone" as a requirement, but Twitter seems to have clearly communicated that their definition included "everyone" and so, on their own understanding of the term "shadow-banning", did not "shadow-ban" anyone.
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