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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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.

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)

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".

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.

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.

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.

I agree. However:

But that's the linguistic ambiguity the censorious are exploiting. We should perhaps rectify it ?

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