Undercover Video: Twitter Uses “Shadow Banning” to Censor Political Speech
“they just think that no one is engaging with their content when in reality, no one is seeing it”
Thursday, undercover video outfit Project Veritas released a disturbing video featuring Twitter employees explaining a process they refer to as “shadow banning”, essentially suppressing content created by certain users from showing up in follower newsfeeds.
The video is a compilation of conversations with present and former Twitter employees, each discussing a different part of Twitter’s unofficial “shadow banning” policy.
Twitter is a private company and free to run their business as they (and shareholders) see fit, that said, based on the content of Project Veritas’ latest video, their unofficial rules are subjective and single out a very specific type of user based on their political ideology
Content managers and engineers explained how they filter out pro-Trump users and that those filters are subjectively applied, often letting liberal-leaning content through the filters.
A current Twitter employee described the censorship of conservative content as a way to “ban…a way of talking”
Watch the full video here:
Yeah, this isn’t helping:
Why is #shadowban have 50k tweets but ranked lower at 16 than trending topics with only a few thousand tweets? @jack pic.twitter.com/RZT7FZmeUD
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 11, 2018
Wednesday, Project Veritas released video footage of a Twitter network engineer discussing the company’s willingness to disclose Trump’s private Twitter record.
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Comments
This.
This is the reason undercover videos from groups like Project Veritas are required.
Ten years ago multiple conservatives protested that they were being “banned” from social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook based upon bogus “complaints” that they were violating vague or even unstated usage standards – or that those standards were being enforced apparently only against non-liberal posters. Press and the companies tried dismissing the protests as paranoid fantasies – which might have worked except that it was easy to post (elsewhere) transcripts and documentation showing shenanigans on the part of the companies.
When calling conservative targets “cra-cra” over this fell flat (“who you going to believe – Twitter/Facebook/etc. – or your lying eyes?” goes the old joke.) those same targets noticed that their social media access seemed to be sometimes be rather hit-or-miss. They could post, and the posters appeared (to the posters) to have access, except that those who already had sizable numbers of followers heard from their followers that THEY couldn’t see the posts. Or it was obvious from the site’s own docs that a conservative with sizable likes or replies somehow was waaaaay down the list of “hot topics” than they should be based on the site’s own public standards for rankings. And so on. Again with the “you’re crazy, it’s not happening” defense, but even though harder and more steps to prove this was going on – it was still often possible to prove it. Next came the “software glitch” defense – except funny how the “software glitches” seemed to be happening to the same folks over and over – and be somewhat selective in the political leanings of the victims.
The term “soft banning” or “shadow banning” came into being to describe a situation where a poster apparently could still post all he/she wanted – but the poster’s posts were made in- or less visible than they should have been. All the benefits of banning speech you disagree with without the stress of having to publicly defend your infringement of someone else’s access to a theoretically public forum. AND the added possible bonus of wasting the shadow-banned poster’s time and effort without them having a clue that their voice has been muted or altogether silenced. Orwell would be so proud – you’ve managed to outlaw “bad think” without making it easily apparent that that’s what you’ve done.
And the bonus bonus that you get to pretend it’s not happening and the target is mental.
Except now here we are – with videos of social media employes fessing up to what they think are fellow travelers that the targets are NOT paranoid – because they really are being singled out based on politics and not some random non-existent software “glitches”.
The solution is very simple. Get the fu*k off of twitter!
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