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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So, uh, the latest Twitter Files just dropped. This one is about Trump and his removal.

Taibbi claims the following.

  1. Twitter post-Trump-ban was now willing to carry forward a policy of "the president can be banned" no matter what.

  2. 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.

  3. Trust and Safety team members were meeting with the FBI and DHS regularly during this time period.

  4. 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).

  5. 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.

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.

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

Banning a user from a web forum in such a way that the banned user is unaware of the ban. Usually takes the form of showing that user's posts/profile/etc. only to that user; other users never see them. Considered underhanded chicken-shit behavior.

And according to Twitter

People are asking us if we shadow ban. 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.

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:

  1. 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;

  2. 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).

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:

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.

By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will be discouraged to continue their unwanted behavior or create new accounts

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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