Twitter and Periscope Shadowbans Dilbert creator | Hacker News Reader

Twitter and Periscope Shadowbans Dilbert creator

blog.dilbert.com

44 pointsh43k3r48 comments

Twitter has been shadow banning a lot of pro-trump people lately.

For example Barack Obama's brother, Malik. His entire feed is basically Trump support and he was shadow banned the other day. I am happy that they have corrected the issue, they were called out hard for it.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aobamamalik%20shadow&src=...

His feed died right around the time that half the internet (and Twitter) died due to the dyndns DDOS and he writes it off as a "coincidence" instead of the most likely cause. I'm normally a fan of Scott Adams, but it feels like he's getting a little tin foil hat as he is aging...

It seems that Soros thinks more about the "Dilbert Guy" more than he should.

FWIW, he's been complaining about shadowbanning for at least a week, well before the effects of the DDOS: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151981022076/is-twitter-shadowb...

I feel like I know Twitter...but I honestly don't know what is meant by shadowbanning in Twitter. If such a concept were to be possible, would it have something to do with Twitter tweaking out Adams' tweets show up for users who have their timelines set to be curated (instead of by timeliness)? This seems like a conspiracy theory that Adams hasn't done much to independently evaluate.

Ah, ok. I guess I misunderstood what he wrote.

A Twitter shadowban is when they throw knives in your Cheerios.

Doesn't make a lot of sense, but there you go.

I've been provably shadowbanned by Twitter before so it is something they practice. N/s what happened in his case.

There were some reports earlier:

https://medium.com/@UnshavedGoat/is-twitter-shadowbanning-yo...

http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2016/07/twitter-shadowbans-cens...

I thought the "coincidence" he was talking about was that the DDOS occurred on the same day that he jokingly threatened to take down Twitter.

That his viewer counter dropped to zero was (as I interpret this post) unrelated to the hack, and the result of some kind of moderation. Whether that is true, I cannot tell.

> I thought the "coincidence" he was talking about was that the DDOS occurred on the same day that he jokingly threatened to take down Twitter.

Yes, exactly. He gave twitter a "deadline" of two days, two days before the dyn attack and specifically wanted to (jokingly) point out that he wasn't responsible for it.

Censorship is a really concerning problem, with no obvious solution, when more and more of our communication is published by privately owned third-parties. The other frustrating thing is that this so often happens, and we don't even get a response from the censoring party. I know there is no expectation of free speech on a private platform, but it's still a serious social problem when everyone voluntarily publishes there anyway.

I wish that I hadn't read this link. I've enjoyed Dilbert for many years, and it will never be the same for me now that I know that Adams is crazy.

Yeah, you're a bit late to the crazy train when it comes to Adams. He's been an unrefined troll online for quite some time. He'll talk politics or other bullshit and then say it was all just a joke when he gets called on it.

I hope you don't also like Orson Scott Card...

What has he done that's crazy? People here are calling him crazy for supporting trump, but that's just a reflection of the political distribution of the HN community. Has he done anything truly crazy?

It continues the conversation started by Ellen Pao cutting off Project Include's connection with YC because of Peter Thiel donating money to Donald Trump. As Sam Altman said in his tweet: "YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee".

I apologize for getting really political and I say that you are free to act however you see fit but voting for Hillary isn't exactly taking the high road and to act as if voting for Trump is some morally reprehensible evil while condoning her candidacy seems disingenuous.

Agreed.

I have conversations with a lot of people about politics, even though where I live it puts me sometimes into uncomfortable positions and I'm sure I've lost customers or other business opportunities due to it.

The people supporting clinton fall into two baskets (sorry, couldn't resist).

#1 are people who have reasons (sometimes good, sometimes bad) for supporting clinton. I can have very productive conversations with these people, and, intellectually honest ones.

#2 are the people that simply say that any support for trump whatsoever is tantamount to treason and betrayal (morally/personally or even one time, someone actually said it should be "illegal"). They rarely have any good reasons for supporting clinton and when it is, I generally find it to be an issue where they interpret position as indelible truth. EG: Clinton is better for LGBT people, if you support Trump, you hate LGBT people. Perhaps LGBT people, of which I am one, simply have different priorities? What if I believe trump will do a better job with the economy and I consider that more important than having legislation protecting who will bake a cake at my wedding? Many people I used to consider this friends take that position as a moral and personal treason.

I unfortunately have a lot less friends than a year ago.

Nothing, really.

Its just that he has the audacity to have a different opinion than others. And/or that he doesn't recognize how historic a clinton presidency would be and/or agree that trump is zomg dangerous.

He's also definitely very accomplished at trolling people who hate the fact that his opinion differs. See: clinton endorsement, see gary johnson endorsement, see this entire post [http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152117093416/how-to-insult-me-o...].

But, really, you shouldn't take my word for it. Read his original post about the shadowban and see if you think its conspiratorial in nature: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151981022076/is-twitter-shadowb...

> I won’t jump the gun and assume something nefarious is happening. But I will say that IF it is happening, I would regard it as treason. If one political party can use the machinery of social networks to reduce free speech, that is an attack on American values at the deepest level.

> I hope you don't also like Orson Scott Card...

Not really, and I already knew about that one.

(But if Neal Stephenson is crazy, I don't want to know about it.)

He had a shrewd perspective on cubicle politics in the 1990's that implied he possessed some deep rationality and insight about human nature. I suppose people change, or else I misinterpreted Dilbert.

Scott Adams insight has been very interesting. You may not agree with his current endorsement, but his analysis from a persuasion perspective is unique. No one else predicted that Trump would do this well. He started predicting a Trump win in August of 2015 when everyone thought Trump's participation in the Republican primaries was a joke. Take a look at his first posts on Trump. Nobody was even close to picking Trump as a front runner then. http://blog.dilbert.com/tagged/Trump/page/34

I guarantee you no one at Twitter thinks about Scott Adams even half as much as Scott Adams does.

I agree that it sounds fantastic, but they've jumped into the muck before. For example, they removed Milo's verification checkmark just to punish him (I tend to think he deserved his eventual banning for violating rules, but it's strange to "unverify" him as a punishment -- seems petty). When certain hashtags (usually conservative) start trending, they are often missing from the autosuggest service. I find it really strange that Twitter does this sort of thing, but I don't have any other explanations.

I would disagree that the last ban for Milo was justified. I would say it's hardly justifiable (without proof) that he was leading an army of trolls to attack Leslie. The only reason Twitter responded so harshly was that it was against a celebrity and not an ordinary user. (Those kinds of attacks hit everyday users as well.. but nothing this public/drastic happens to them)

I read all of the tweets back-and-forth between milo and leslie jones (and I would encourage anyone to do the same).

Now, I do like milo (I find him hilarious), and I'm not such a fan of jones but I do understand he exists to be a provocateur so I knew that it was highly plausible that he was did really say something that was inappropriate.

After having read them all, I came across strongly with the opinion that while supporters (probably a lot of sock puppets) did say really terrible things about jones, that nothing milo himself said was inappropriate. Also, at no point did milo incite his followers to attack or otherwise harass jones directly. To the contrary, jones was the one who said things to the effect of telling her supporters to "get him".

Ultimately I think it came down to the fact that twitter is making money off of movie studios and celebrities being on twitter (not just jones) and twitter realizes that most of their users are there (and probably an even larger portion of their growth) comes from the presence of people like jones and other celebrities on twitter. Remove them and you remove users who are looking at paying ads. Its a very big stick for a PR agency or her agents to wield.

Twitter bans or downgrades people for political reasons all the time. An example of twitter's pettiness; some time before they banned Breitbart's Milo for trolling, they removed the "verified" tag from his account. There is no sensible justification for this except that twitter was trying to hurt his credibility/give him a hard time. Regardless of what you think of Milo, that's just silly. Twitter is not at all conservative with (shadow)banning or other trickery. They'll even suppress trending tags that they don't agree with politically.

Twitter doesn't suppress trends and there's no way in heck they'd go to the trouble to auto-detect when Scott Adams mentions Donald Trump in a Periscope feed. That would require actual engineering effort (aside from being completely insane) which they don't put into stuff like this. When they want to deal with jerkoffs like Milo, the Trust & Safety team handles it, not their engineers.

> Twitter doesn't suppress trends

I've seen them do it in real time. When politically unfavorable hashtags start trending, they will often suddenly disappear off the trending list.

They ABSOLUTELY suppressed #HillarysHealth

Even if this were true (he has no proof and the more likely explanation is a glitch), his thesis about this being treason is incorrect. Twitter is not required to host any content they don't like or want. Adams can still bring his message to other mediums.

Also, this post segues from conspiracy theory to political bolstering. It's likely he's using clickbait here to prop up his favored candidate.

He pays lip service to the fact that Twitter is not legally required to do any of that, but then just says that Twitter should die anyway. Which is the part that's worrying about these discourses, where they just erode the freedoms and liberties afforded to society to fit within their narrow world-view of how the rest of the world should behave.

I much prefer the person who labels this type of behavior by Twitter as something unproductive or undesired, but to label it as "treason" lets me know all I need to know about the way this person is currently parsing the world.

It is treason because they are adamantly attacking Trump supporters because they are Trump supporters.

Even if that were true, how's that treason again?

The owner of a publishing platform exercising freedom of press in a way which disfavor Adams' preferred candidate isn't treason.

I'm pretty sure ChickFila established that corporations have just as much right to free speech as we do. This includes and is not limited to choosing what content they would like to share.

If that's what twitter wants to do, they need to be truthful about it, and perhaps update their mission statement:

  Our mission: To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.

- https://about.twitter.com/company

Let me be clear: if they want to push a political agenda, then they have (afaik) every right to. But they should not pretend they're some (ahem) Fair and Balanced firehose of everyone's thoughts and ideas.

Shockingly, the original blog post's title is much less sensational and certain than the submitted title. Mods, please update.

A publisher choosing what content they want to publish and/or promote isn't "moral treason", it's the essence of free press.

If Adams is unhappy with Twitter, he is free to publish and promote his content via other means. Twitter not choosing to cooperate with him might be a contract issue between him and Twitter, but it's not an issue of Adams's liberty, which does not extend to directing Twitter's use of Twitter's resources.

Oh look, this argument again. Adams does publish and promote his content via other means.

But Twitter took on this responsibility themselves. Here's their self-stated mission:

  Our mission: To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.

- https://about.twitter.com/company

Recently their mission is more like, "To give everyone the power to create and share ideas that we agree with and information that furthers our personal beliefs instantly, without barriers."

Its a slight variation since Adams was careful to not use the word free speech, so they can't use that particular tact (twitter is private, you don't have any right to free speech, read the constitution somtime!).

Yep, they have every right afaik to push the conversation whichever way they please, but it's beyond sleazy to pretend they're totally hands-off.

A company having a mission statement that is deceptive corporate PR might be many things, but it certainly isn't even remotely analogous to treason, moral or otherwise.

The problem is that twitter doesn't display their feed as "twitter opinion," nor does facebook. When I go to the new york times or a similar publication's works I understand that I'm getting a biased to their POV feed of information.

What Adams is saying here is that, as a pure aggregation platform, twitter should not be biasing against a particular political ideology. Keep in mind he's not saying that its an abridgement of free speech. Just that twitter has a moral duty to be fair in their dealings. You can disagree with that, but, twitter should be more honest about that if that's how they want to do things.

If twitter wants to become a platform for purely unchallenging discussion of only democratic candidates (and some subset of that) they can and should make that fact clear.

Failing to explicitly label publications that are shaped by the publisher's opinion and preference explicitly as such is still not even remotely comparable to treason.

Twitter is not a publisher nor a press outlet, it's a platform.

Would you be OK if Comcast decided to filter out Trump campaign emails? After all, Trump is still free to send letters, or talk to people in person.

It is exactly an advertising supported press outlet. The fact that what it publishes is consumer-contributes content is, well, not unprecedented among advertising-supported press outlets, even in the dead-tree form, and (within the bounds of its contractual relations) it is free to curate that consumer-contributed content.

And, no, I wouldn't support ISPs curating content, which is why I support net neutrality regulations.

Why is this thread flagged?

Because it goes against the narrative SJW's want to paint. Anything with the slightest connection to being pro Trump will get flagged.

We wish Scott Adams.

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