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Comment by dev_head_up | Hacker News Reader

Was sceptical of this myself until I experienced it. Scott Adams completely disappeared from my feed for, well I'd like to say months but can't pinpoint when it started. I assumed he had just given up his account/been banned. Until one day I searched for him, and there he was still posting. He had actively tweeted while I was logged on yet it was no-where on my timeline! I scrolled back a bit collarating tweets that appeared for me on the homepage versus times that he had posted, he was no-where to be seen and presumably under some sort of shadow block by Twitter itself. Before someone comes in and says it was due to preferences etc, I don't follow a huge bunch of accounts, I don't like/retweet or even tweet.

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Scott Adams has blogged that he thinks it's about his politics and trollishly pro-Trump tweeting/blogging, and I've never been certain whether or not to believe it was true at all (he needn't even be lying for it to be false: it's possible to get quite confused going through these things with many followers, doubly so with any reason to be suspicious or paranoid).

But in light of an incident like this it seems far more plausible to me that they have a more general-purpose algorithm at work that, in a few cases like United and @ScottAdamsSays, misbehaves radically. At a guess, some anti-spam thing gone terribly wrong. (A missing tweet identified in this incident is basically "United training video as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade blimp scene". Do viral-joke tweets like this have similar enough dynamics to Scott Adams tweets and spam that they'd trigger similar filters?)

(But hey, maybe I'm not paranoid enough :b)

postscript: hey, why the downvotes? am i being too speculative? too paranoid? not paranoid enough? it's okay to downvote but do help me out here.

He's blogged about it several times. According to his blog posts, he can track which posts get "shadowbanned" by blog analytics. Apparently, his posts regarding Trump or climate science aren't showing up in a lot of his followers' feeds. Even more remarkably, he seems to have gotten around it for now with code words - tweeting that the post is about kittens when it's really about a supposedly shadowbanned subject, which has supposedly restored his normal blog traffic rates from Twitter.

See http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156806516721/the-social-media-h... and http://blog.dilbert.com/post/157904840851/dopamine-puppets

Sure looks like Twitter is in the business of censoring content that doesn't fit their political views. If they'll do that, there's no telling what else they'll censor.

Beware the filter bubble

Hmm. I'd say Scott is the only vaguely political account I follow. Next up would be one BBC News and a local newspaper account. Apart from that I follow mainly sports teams (my main use for it is scores and fantasy football) and some selected ones for tv shows. Less than 40 accounts in total.

If anyone can explain how Twitter uses that information to decide to hide Scott Adams from my timeline, I'd love to know. It seems to me that there's one obvious explanation.

In short, because they think you'd engage less with Scott Adams' content.

Filter bubbles are an algorithmic attempt to give you the content that you want the most. For example, Twitter might have identified at some level that you like and retweet sports related content more often than political content. Or even further, that you like left-leaning content more than right. So, they'll do everything they can to serve you what they think you want. If it keeps you scrolling, then they make more ad dollars.

All of these nuanced inputs impact what you see on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

The problem is, there IS a difference between what you want to see and what you should see. Just because you love cat photos, doesn't mean that the NY Times should be filled with them.

If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend this (9 min) ted talk on the topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...

I've seen that and I'm sorry, but I really don't accept your explanation. I've never retweeted/liked/replied or tweeted, ever. I'm a passive consumer. I don't follow political accounts, or search out political views there. If anything, I reckon I was clicking a lot on his blog links via tweets, so (presumably) he should have been showing up more... rather than not at all.

I don't mean to sound like I'm holding you accountable for this! It's just, well this kinda thing is well dodgy and I want to assure people I'm not just cribbing about this without a basis.

Just a thought, but even of clicking his blog links means you're engaging more, perhaps twitter is guiding their users to engagement in the form of scrolling through their feeds, since that's what twitter makes their money from. Thinking about it that way, maybe it makes sense to filter out tweets that are more likely to take you away from the site

Yeah, I see what you are saying. In that case, I am simply not qualified to answer your question.

The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why we are all pissed.

Just to be clear--I too am pissed.

Then a variety of trolls and other scum showed up and started ruining people's lives.

I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.

If there was too much noise in your feed it was because you followed the wrong people, simply.

Sure. But my Twitter feed is not important enough for me to do something about that. As it is, it's somewhat entertaining (I check it perhaps once a week) whereas if it was unfiltered I never would. So I am at least one person for whom it makes business sense for Twitter to filter in order to keep me engaged.

That changed a long time ago, I'm surprised people are only noticing now. The change was not borne out of malice: like Facebook, they try to filter out accounts with too much noise or which you don't really interact with, to show you only stuff you're really interested in. In the past you'd see all @-replies and a single noisy account could basically flood your timeline, that's hardly the case nowadays.

In the case of Scott Adams mentioned above, it happens to me regularly with tons of people who are absolutely unthreatening. There is certainly real censorship going on inside all these centralized platforms (like deleting content), but Occam suggests this is just Twitter trying too hard.

The shadowbanning and bubbling only started like two years ago. That thing about seeing all replies was changed... I don't know, eight years ago? And that made all the sense in the world and it's in no way censoring or anything... My friends talking to people I don't know is not something I care about. But my friends talking to me and me not seeing it because they are shadowbanned? That's a new low.

You can also see this in action with replies. Certain shadowbanned accounts will only show up in threads if you follow them. If you open the thread in an incognito window, certain people disappear.

"Trust and Safety" is just Orwellian newspeak for controlling who gets to hear which opinions.

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