The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists
twitter.com
twitter.com
- The "secret" aspect of all this can be largely ignored. Twitter is under no obligation to tell its users exactly how their Tweets are moderated. I am sure most moderation tools are secret, including whatever Twitter (or for that matter, HN) uses today.
- There are aspects of user privacy that are important (e.g. how user data is gathered, where is it stored, whether it complies with various data governance regulations) which would be interesting, but have been largely ignored by these Tweets so far.
- I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
- All companies have hierarchies of escalation. It is not surprising to me that there is a "top people" level of escalation in the form of SIP-PES that Weiss mentions. In fact, I'm reasonably sure something similar probably exists at Twitter today, consisting of Musk and some close advisors. They might even be using the exact same group!
- A lot of the discussion Weiss quotes as if it's top-secret information seems to show...individuals behaving reasonably while struggling with the extremely hard problem of content moderation at scale? Roth and others seem to be essentially saying, "We don't want to kick these users off the platform. Maybe if we limit their reach a bit, we won't get them inciting howling mobs that target and disturb other users?" Post-Musk Twitter seems to be struggling with the same thing, as the Kanye West debacle shows.
Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror. All I can really see is a company that never grew to Facebook scale trying to grapple with its content moderation problem without having the resources or perhaps temperament to hire hundreds of cheap content moderators like Facebook does.
I bet you would not like for your comment here to be secretly removed. In fact, many users are shocked to discover when this happens, as I share here [1].
The big difference is that Twitter links are routinely used by journalists and such who will notice and specifically call out Tweets as being deleted. A shadow ban / hellban on Twitter would be much more easily noticed by the media.
On the other hand, no one in the media to a rounding error cares about shadow bans on Reddit or HN.
In fact, many have! It's going to be some Mastodon instance in my case, but not saying it couldn't be Truth Social for you or other folks that think they do a better job at content moderation than Twitter does. This is more productive than holding up Twitter's (admittedly imperfect) content moderation as part of some thought-molding conspiracy.
Colloquially, I think many information suppression tactics get lumped under the term "shadow-ban" and that your definition is very narrow. It reinforces your position so I understand why you're defining it as such but it's not very convincing to anyone who doesn't share your position. Of course, that's assuming you're genuinely interested in persuasion instead of yelling into the echo chamber.
I do agree with your points about this not being a surprise and how some are over-exaggerating the severity of these leaks but I'm also slightly concerned over how blase "hackers" here on this site are treating the news. All around us are these huge, easy-to-abuse, global influence platforms with cozy backchannels to the most powerful bureaucratic state (US govt) that we've ever seen. And yet many comments I've seen so far are along the lines of, "No worries, this stuff happens all the time and is totally normal and okay. Move along now!" I would have expected more skepticism, cynicism and backlash from this crowd. Am I wrong?
Reasonable criticism. I suppose Twitter representatives have probably used this same definition to squirm out from questioning before, and it's not a great look. Although siblings comment are pointing out that Twitter did define it as identical to what I'm saying in a blog post; so at least they are consistent in what they were saying pre-Musk.
On the persuasion front – I'll give it a try!
I think the reason that Twitter hid behind the narrower definition of a shadow ban is to avoid saying the harder-to-stomach truth that "information suppression tactics", as you put them, are essential to content moderation. Think about this – is HN's (supposed) voting ring detector an "information suppression tactic"? Is flagging posts? Why is Bari Weiss not posting breathless stories about them? I think the only difference is that zero people in Weiss's circle use this orange web site. I would love to be convinced otherwise, though.
> All around us are these huge, easy-to-abuse, global influence platforms with cozy backchannels to the most powerful bureaucratic state (US govt) that we've ever seen. And yet many comments I've seen so far are along the lines of, "No worries, this stuff happens all the time and is totally normal and okay. Move along now!" I would have expected more skepticism, cynicism and backlash from this crowd. Am I wrong?
No, but I think we had our moment of outrage around widespread surveillance by the US government in 2013 and the years after it. Also, almost none of Weiss's or Taibbi's breathless revelations are about intervention by the US government – a few are about the Democratic Party and most are about Twitter itself. The only response that I see by a sitting Government official anywhere is to suggest that the Twitter ban on a story is against the 1st Amendment [1].
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You can disagree with the definition Twitter chose, but you can't retcon your own definition onto Twitter's policy statements.
However, I see a lot of people here dismissing the wider and (imo) more valid complaints about veiled moderation tactics by beating up these two and calling it a day, case closed. I don't care what specific narrow definition twitter chose on a whim in some blog post and I'm not concerned with strictly "shadow-banning". The fact is, these global influence platforms are easy to subvert by immensely powerful interests (state actors, billionaires, etc) and the power we're placing in these people's hands is incredible, way beyond what any authoritarian dictator of yesteryear could even dream up. And when how the sausage is made is ever so slightly exposed, it's dismissed and hand-waved away.
What could go wrong?
I'll also add that you're wrong about the topic of the thread, bavell's point is absolutely on topic and the only reason you're refusing to engage and call his argument a red herring is because you know he's right and don't want to admit it.
The assumptive close might sell a used car, but "you just won't admit it" isn't especially persuasive on a message board.
If I wanted to control the debate (or however you'd choose to put it) on this benighted subject, all I'd have to do is keep posting on the thread, which immediately and thankfully got yanked off the front page by the flamewar detector. Oh, wait. You caught me! :)
[0]: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601013855697588224
[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
There was a post on Hacker News when this blog was released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623306
One post there sums it up pretty well: Is it just me? Did I just read a blog post that said “We don’t do this thing I’m going to explain how we do the thing we don’t do.”
It's interesting how selective people are about the supposed Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
How does that make what "most people" would consider not matter? Seems like a non-sequitur to me but maybe I'm not understanding your point.
And, most services still use a form of shadow moderation [2]. So it's perfectly fine to discuss here. Attempts to shut down conversation are just that.
[1] https://getstream.io/blog/feature-announcement-shadow-ban/
Whoever is following you and using the chronological timeline will see your tweets just fine as they happen.
Twitter deciding not to promote your tweet in the trending-ish/follows timeline doesn't seem close to shadowbanning to me.
This happened to my tweet here [1]. It doesn't show up under the parent tweet [2]. It appears to be some sort of domain-based shadow filtering.
It's probably because of the cheap .win domain I bought for $2. Why would Twitter censor that link? One could speculate it was because patriots.win moved there from r/The_Donald. But they "don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology." right?
For the record, I built Reveddit because I perceived that r/The_Donald made heavier use of shadow moderation than the rest of Reddit. However I later learned that its use is common across Reddit and other sites.
Shadow moderation is nobody's friend, except to serve as a reminder of that fact. It was purportedly built to deal with bots, but bots know how to check the visibility of their content. It hurts genuine individuals the most.
[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136
[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553
It is honestly silly to be surprised. Any community with just a few thousand users will ban entire domains, it's not surprising that they resort to banning entire TLDs at the billion user level.
It was built to deal with jerks who, when moderated, would sign up under a new account, or would repost the same content over and over again, or who would invade discussions, distract them with vitriol or out of context nonsense – even if each post as original.
The whole point of the concept was that the jerks would FEEL like they were contributing to the discussion, but maybe being ignored, while maintain a static history or login that made it easier to moderate them.
I've never seen a platform provide an explanation like the one you give here.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/8k5qh3/if_y...
It has a fairly rich history, and evolution, as well as counter-measures, and counter-counter-measures and counter-counter-counter-measures.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...
[2] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
Yes, other techniques exist. Sometimes people, being imprecise, ignorant and/or lazy, call those techniques "shadow banning", but that isn't what they are.
What umbrella term would you use for moderator actions that are kept secret from the author of the content? "Moderation" on its own can be secret or transparent, so by itself isn't an apt description.
People are quick to jump to the "It's their website, they don't have to do anything yada yada" but there is an implied social contract between the users and the owners that for whatever tier of service (free, paid, ad-supported, whatever) you are using you will receive an equal amount and quality of service as every other user on the platform.
I'm not against moderation, I'm against secret moderation that wastes the time of other people's lives. Just be forthright and tell people they are muted but can still participate.
Personally I prefer the term shadow moderation.
I'm logged in, and can see your tweet in the replies just fine. Still not shadowingbanning.
So there is shadow moderation going on. I'm not so bothered about whether it's called a shadow ban or shadow moderation. Also, I can see why some former Twitter employees want this distinction to be understood given the post they previously put out. I just think that's a hard sell for the public who is just coming to understand this issue. Even I didn't know about Twitter's 2018 post.
Finally, there was already substantial dispute over whether or not Twitter's initial claims were accurate. See "Shadowbanning is not a thing": black box gaslighting and the power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms" by Kelley Cotter:
https://kelleycotter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Shadowba...
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
I don't think you are wrong. I do think this is a powerful tool, that should be scrutinized. But I also can't think of any better alternative. So, in the meantime, ISTM that talking about how it's talked about (as a great conspiracy and revelation, when it's well-known and the best known solution to a problem we have) seems the right way to go about it.
And note that not so long ago Musk himself said that this solution is what he wants for Twitter¹.
I just think when talking about the "Twitter Files", the more interesting story is how Musk is spreading disinformation and propaganda to increase his own wealth and power and how supposed journalists are uncritically helping him do it.
[1] https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1601020232994201601
The same could be said of Weiss or (by implication) you. "Shadow banning" sounds scary, which is precisely why people are flinging it around carelessly but also precisely why they shouldn't.
There's a long standing phenomenon where the people working in tech have more visibility (or just insight) to witness business models slowly taking more and more advantage of the end user over the course of years, and don't notice that they've slowly hollowed out the standards they think they still hold.
For example: we all just sorta accept that some of our friends and relations work - or want to work - at places like Facebook and Google. There's so many of them that we wind up treating it like a morally neutral job or are seen as a weirdo.
When a layperson talks about their standards/expectations, they haven't had their barometer worn down over the years. All they hear back from those of us is in the know is some version of the "I'm not touching you" game.
"No we'd never do X, we do a lot of things that are in the same category you place X. Things that bother you for the same reason you don't like X. Things that would make you seethe if the tech wasn't impenetrable to you. But we'd never, ever, X."
However, the right, due to its inherent animus for large sections of society, breaks the rules so much more often and so much more egregiously (eg Babylon Bee) that actual enforcement decisions are applied against the right more often.
This is also why anti-trans actions by right-wing state governments in the US have been consistently shut down by the courts (e.g. [1]). There is no evidence to support their actions -- they're driven by sheer animosity.
Nothing "nonsense" about this.
The way the right plays the refs is by claiming that the fact that the right gets banned disproportionately ipso facto means that the rules are biased. That's what's "nonsense" here.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/bongo-productions-llc-et...
> Although at least one key supporter of the Act in the General Assembly justified its requirements in relation to supposed risks of sexual assault and rape, there is (1) no evidence, in either the legislative record or the record of this case, that there is any significant problem of individuals’ abusing trans-inclusive restroom policies for that purpose and (2) no reason to think that, if such a problem existed, the mandated signs would address it.
The kind of "evidence" that is normally presented is typically provided by 3rd-rate activist researchers, attracted to dogma, and who simply come to whatever conclusion perpetuates that dogma.
I've made claims here and presented clear evidence. You called it "nonsense" with no substantiation other than vague gestures toward Christians (which Christians?) being targeted (how?) for their beliefs (which beliefs?)
I understand that you're trying to drag me down to the meta level so you can beat me with experience, but I'm not willing to take the bait here, sorry.
You've just pulled up a bit of dross from a highly partisan organisation and are claiming that this is proof of something.
It would be like me quoting fox news as proof.
I checked your post history. It's pretty clear you are deep in an alternate reality. I hope you can find your way out of it some day.
I didn't "gasp", but, silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible.
He, and who knows how many others, presented sensible analyses against extended lockdowns in schools. This dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
The harm done to an entire generation of children is very real. The opportunity cost from wasting vaccinations in children is very real. The discussion was warped, and the narrative was rammed down people's brains. There are second-order effects with that kind of brain power-washing at mass scale.
This wasn't an isolated incident either. Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
I would hope that journalists conduct their research through better means than solely reading Tweets. That would be an exceptionally lazy standard, one which would merit a failing grade for a high school paper.
That being said, "systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes" seems basically false given that this person co-authored a story that was published in the Wall Street Journal! [1]
> Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
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[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...
That's not a good reason to suppress scientists tweets.
Also, many of the best journalists of the past decades have been loudly warning of being shadowbanned, supressed, deranked etc.
> I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
A large part of these Twitter reveals show just how much government connections pushed extreme "moderation" (read: censorship) of specific issues.
Just wait until you realize that corporations at a certain scale become a form of government themselves!
The point here is that they were specifically responding to government requests to censor information. That is truly government overreach, but in the opposite direction to what you claim.
My understanding is that anyone using the chrono timeline could still his tweets as they happened. Twitter deciding not to promote his tweets in the algo timeline seems far away from blocking.
1) We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said. When censorship is carried out secretly it will inevitably trend towards abuse. One of the examples given in these leaks is that @DrJBhattacharya [1] was secretly put on a trends blacklist because of what he was saying. He's a well spoken doctor and Stanford epidemiologist, but he publicly spoke against the political measures being taken against COVID, such as lockdowns. So he was blacklisted. That's just so incredibly wrong, and enabled only by secrecy.
2) Again with the goal of adjusting how things are said, instead of what is said: If you think somebody is an idiot, saying that accomplishes absolutely nothing besides sending discourse to the level of a dumpster dive at a cheap seafood joint on a hot summer day. By contrast, engaging in good faith and simply discussing the topic not only keeps the conversation healthy, but might even actually change some minds. Secretly censoring the shitposter does not really encourage him to engage in a more productive fashion, because he may not even realize he's behaving a way that's not really considered acceptable, let alone attempt to correct it.
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Literal spam is a different topic, and I think conflating the two is disingenuous. Doing things like blacklisting doctors because of what they say has little to do with banning somebody trying to impersonate other accounts and spamming 'give me 1 and I'll give you 2' crypto scams.
[1] - https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/briefing/american-childre...
Twitter is a private company that wants to sell advertisements by enabling people to have happy conversations. Fundamentally, they are going to optimize for that, and not whatever high-minded ideals of censorship that we hold dear to our hearts. If a scientist is yelling about mysterious conspiracies and causing arguments on the site, they will use whatever least harmful tool is available to them to shut up said scientist.
It's certainly possible that Musk-owned Twitter will similarly pivot to selling advertisements for MAGA hats and guns or whatever; and censor all talking points that run counter to their views. This would also be a reasonable course of action for them, and many of us have prepared our migrations away from the site in case this happens.
I disagree with this, you are clubbing two groups together here. Yes, the wider political sphere in the US might be concerned because a billionaire can upend their carefully orchestrated social media campaigns. And I personally couldn't care less about that. For that matter, do you care about how well your favorite politician's next Twitter ad campaign goes?
Users in this community, on the other hand, are almost certainly technically proficient enough to back up their Tweets and quickly migrate to Mastodon or Tumblr or their favorite social network, should the need arise. In fact, dozens of us have already done so! For us, Twitter turning into Truth Social tomorrow would not be a Big Deal. This is consistent with my statement that the (probably) slightly left-leaning moderation on old Twitter was also not a Big Deal.
No, Twitter's mission statement is "to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" [1]
Nothing in there about 'happy conversations' and, while selling advertising has been and may continue to be a means to fund this mission, it is not part of their mission. Means are not ends. Companies must run at a profit to survive but they must also work towards and for the mission they serve and the reason they were formed. The Twitter Files have shown that they were failing at this mission (especially the 'without barriers' part), either because they lost focus or were corrupted, or both.
> Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
> We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
Despite their ridiculous bans to those that never broke their ToS and YouTube never explaining what ToS did they break.
I mean, how can Twitter's moderators, many of whom could barely understand college-level STEM or any subject, be so sure that they are on the right side of the history?
They don't need to be, in order to preserve the peace on their platform (for whatever definition of peace).
If you start yelling about mitochondria or climate change at Disneyland, you will be unceremoniously ejected for disturbing the peace at the Magic Kingdom. On the other hand, you can yell about mitochondria or climate change to your heart's content in the local town square all you want, courtesy of the First Amendment.
I don't understand why people think that Twitter, a private company, should be more like the town square than Disneyland.
In a way I agree with you. Twitter is a private company, and it does not necessarily have legal or moral obligation to be neutral or be a town square. Its staff should be perfectly safe to be biased towards left or right, or moderate content with or without facts or consistency.
I also agree with you that Twitter's staff needed to consider brand safety and how to retain advertisers. That's also the theory of Stratechery and why Ben Thompson thought that Elon needed to find revenue stream other than ads to really push his ideal of free speech on social media.
On the other hand, I do wish that Twitter a town square and they do have neutral or at least consistent moderation policies for practical reasons: millions of people do get news or information from Twitter on a daily basis. Millions of people do engage in discussion on Twitter on a daily basis. As a result, Twitter does become essential for facilitating and spreading information. In that regard, moderating debates, especially the controversial ones, can be harmful to the public. Imagine what it would be like if you were Botzmann yet you couldn't discuss your theory, or you were John Snow yet you were silenced for thinking cholera was not spread by miasma. Miasma was the mainstream theory in the late 1890s, no? In the eyes of the people in 1895, Snow was spreading "misinformation" that "could danger people's lives", no? We could safely bet that if there were Twitter at that time, the staff would be sided with the miasma theory, no? Another reason is in the spirit of "veil of ignorance". Society changes. People change. We're progressive today, but we can be conservative tomorrow. We can be left-leaning today and love projecting and attacking people's motives, but we can be right-leaning tomorrow and declare heresy this and evil that. I bet Robespierre believed that no one he guillotined was innocent and he could stay in power for long enough. I bet many people believed that the protestants in St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre deserved the death. I bet the elementary school students in China believed that they were righteous when they beat their teachers and school principals to death with knuckled belts. Without us believing that we can expressive our opinions in public safely, there will be guarantee that truth could come out quickly, and there will no guarantee that your group of people will be safe, no matter how dominant you are for now.
No, there are certain topics that are simply outside of the bounds of acceptable discourse. For example, Holocaust denial is inherently uncivil and should be off limits from every general discussion forum, regardless of the wording the denier chooses to use.
Okay, good start.
> We should censor for how things are said, instead of what is said.
What? No. Platforms can censor whatever they want. The point is that users should be told when their content is actioned. Mod actions shouldn't be kept secret from the authors of content.
Therefore, we should be concerned with how platforms are censoring, and not what they are censoring. That is, a platform who tells you when they censor is more desirable than one who keeps their censorship secret from you.
She very well may understand, but is assuming (correctly) that her audience does not.
Twitter has no legal obligation to do so. I think a lot of people would hesitate about engaging with a platform that actively has its thumb on the scale. I would really rather not have the thought in the back of my mind that invisible, unaccountable forces are the reason my views aren't popular, not that I'm an asshole with stupid opinions.
I think a lot of people would hesitate about engaging with a platform that doesn't actively have its thumb on the scale. Those platforms exist, they are abandoned.
What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
“VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
All without users’ knowledge.
“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
This has a lot in common with Mudge's whistle-blowing case: there is nothing tangible to those familiar with the arts, but it appears to be (or ends up being) red meat "Aha!" gotcha material for those who have never worked in similar environments.
1. Which begs the question: does he really think Twitter's mod tools are unusual, or is he feigning ignorance for some reason known to him?
They do, I list some here [1]
> There is no smoking gun here
Secretive moderation being common doesn't make it normal or right. It's certainly not widely known. For example, I was on a podcast from Aug. 24 this year talking about shadow moderation [2], and the host says around 27:50 that Twitter is not doing this, only excepting "the algorithm". His point, I believe, was that humans were not manipulating content, and I agreed that I was unaware if that was happening.
Plus, if the use of such secretive tooling were widely known, there would be no need to keep them secret.
The claim has always been that secretive moderation is used to deal with spam. Yet, spammers are the most likely to check the visibility of their content. So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414
[2] https://www.wholewhale.com/podcast/what-is-shadow-moderation...
From first principles, the moderators would not consider shadow-banned individuals as 'genuine'.
Since you brought up the subject of spammers - whats your take on email spam transparency, and the use of spam folders? should MTAs (like GMail or Exchange server), in the interest of transparency, immediately reject messages categorized as spam rather than accepting and quietly placing them in the spam folder, never to be read by a human? This would absolutely solve the problem where emails from genuine users end up being blackholed in the spam folder.
It may be that inboxes are different from public or open-ended conversations. What often happens in the moderation of public conversations on social media is that neither person is aware that any removal or demotion occurred. So, even the user(s) whose content was not removed does not have a chance to rescue the content from spam.
> Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
Sure, but maybe they should have some obligation? Maybe the people "gasping in horror" at this information actually did have more expectations around transparency and impartiality than you did, and maybe they're right to have those expectations?
> I don't think Weiss understands what "shadow ban" means. It means that you post Tweets, but no one ever sees them. None of the practices she describes amount to what is usually described as a shadow ban or a hellban. Preventing a post from showing up in trends or searches is not a shadow ban. Google SafeSearch does not "shadow ban" explicit images or links.
You're splitting hairs. Laypeople take shadow banning to be various forms of suppression. This is the same as the hacker/cracker debate of 20+ years ago. Terms are defined by their usage, and once laypeople start using a term in a slightly incompatible way to how you've understood it, you've already lost.
Overall I don't quite get HN sometimes. Lots of people are saying this is no big deal, that every site will have secrete blacklists, that every site does moderation and suppresses things, and so on, so what's the problem?
Isn't it obvious that the way you do things can matter?
For instance, most techy people I've spoken to think that no-fly lists are problematic. Why were you put on a no-fly list? How can you petition for a review of your status if you think your placement was unjust? Who gets to decide who goes on that no-fly list? Is there any periodic review of such decisions to ensure there is no systemic bias or that the no-fly list isn't being abused for personal or political ends? There are many documented examples of people being targeted using the no-fly list for political reasons, for instance.
All of these questions apply to secret suppression lists at social media companies. If Twitter is to become a central place critical to democratic discussion, as Musk has stated is his intent, these questions are then just as relevant as the government deciding who can and cannot fly. The tweets Weiss posted have a number of examples of politically motivated suppression, and you shouldn't so causally dismiss that.
Combined with Taibbi's thread showing the government had some active involvement in moderating content, this is setting up a troubling precedent. This is a conversation that needs to take place.
Let's play a hypothetical game. If restaurants were under no obligations to tell you what ingredients were in their food, but some did anyway, would that change your restaurant eating habits? If so, how?
Irrespective of whether or not you agree with individual decisions, the fact that such systems exist should not be a surprise. These companies operate within legal frameworks across multiple jurisdictions that have endless variations of restrictions on speech and content.
What surprises me is that there are people that whine about this without proposing or creating an alternative.
They have an alternative in mind. It's called unfettered free speech.
Problem for Twitter is that advertisers aren't interested in a fancier 4chan.
When ? I haven't seen any evidence of this.
They fucked up and admitted it (what algo is infallible?)
The fuckup wasn't targeted, it was algorithmic, and it affected both sides of the isle.
Your link literally demonstrates the opposite of your claim.
https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/160101566099344998...
Where was this revealed? I saw Bari Weiss claim it happened but the screenshot she posted as evidence specifically says the account violated their policies.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601020845224128512
I guess you're reading this and saying that "indirect" violations are the same thing as direct, i.e., defined, violations? Is that what's happening? People downvoting me are being absolute pedants about the definition of "shadow banning," and then just give this part a pass and say it's fine?
I guess this is the world we live in now, in every respect. There's so much STUFF going on, and so much written about the stuff, that people can choose to focus on whichever half they want, and find plenty to support their position. But I still live in a world where the general IDEA is the main thing, and Twitter has been shown to do things outside of their stated policy. And, sure, as someone else pointed out, they're allowed to do whatever they want. But they didn't have to hedge and lie about it.
https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1601019554980761600?s...
>>>7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
My definition of "shadow banning" (or hellbanning) is that the user's tweets/posts are not visible to anyone except them; Twitter was not doing that. Twitter was clear in saying "oh, we limit visibility, don't allow certain things in trending topics, etc." and apparently some people think of that as shadow banning.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1022658436704731136?s=46&...
Isn't there a fiduciary duty to be honest with their investors?
To the substance of your statement, they don't shadow ban, so that's not a misleading statement. The fact that a lot of people take an extremely broad view of what shadow banning is doesn't change that. Twitter actually define shadow banning in the link in the tweet you posted, and explain what they do and why that's not shadow banning.[3]
[1] Very good explanation here https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-are-som...
[2] Not to "misrepresent" material facts, which is a form of securities fraud https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/misrepresentation.asp
[3] The original link is down but I found it in the internet archive. https://archive.vn/m4bT4
You yourself literally posted a link from 4 years ago that demonstrates the opposite of this claim. How is this comment so high? I feel like I'm at a UFO convention and people just want to believe.
Accurate. There’s a strong contingent of folks here that believe “the leftists” are oppressing them and “Twitter silences our voices” is a big part of the conspiracy theory.
Musk is throwing fuel on the fire, because he also just wants to believe.
If this is actually your point then you are supporting root's argument, not rebutting it. Root was pointing out poor causal relationships determined from lack of recognition of confounding variables. You just listed another (substantially more famous) example of such a relationship.
twitter has denied what for years? if you're implying they denied they moderate, delete, or derank content, this is absolutely not true.
No one is. These Twitter Files are just building on a right wing prior of them being shadow banned. But they have yet to demonstrate that right wingers are specifically targeted. They don't show why these accounts got flagged (the crux of the issue and none of this means anything without demonstrating this knowledge) but just show prominent right wingers that did get flagged. We just get left with more questions. Do prominent left wingers also get flagged? Do prominent left wingers act in ways that would similarly be flagged? Is flagging biased? (I'm sure it is, but lets' measure it)
It is a common statistical manipulation through leading someone to causal conclusions via selection bias (sometimes called "malinformation"). While not directly said these tweets (and the previous ones) are targeted to make the reader believe that Twitter silences right wing voices. This may very well be true, but they have yet to provide strong evidence of this. Just samples. Problem is, we don't know anything about the distribution of samples so we have no means of determining if they are cherry-picked or not.
Is it unreasonable to suspect people on the right are targeted more often than the people on the left? Wouldn't that be the default assumption and the opposite position would need evidence to prove otherwise?
[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&...
Employees of Trump Entertainment Resorts gave 100% to Democrats!
You're jumping a step here because you're making a sampling error. Like I said before, we know nothing about the distribution.
Let's put this in an extreme example. Suppose there are 100 people. 99 of them have the favorite color green. 1 of them has the favorite color red. Does that mean the logo will be red? What assumptions are implicit here to say yes? (this is where the logic fails) If a singular person controls the color of the logo and that person is not chosen at random then it really doesn't matter how many people have a favorite color green. The logo will be the favorite color of the person that makes the choice. Everyone else is noise.
Coming back to Twitter it would be naive to assume that the choices are being made democratically or uniformly at random. So what does the median employee's opinion matter? We know that higher incomes tend to lean more conservative but this is hard to say here because those studies generally aggregate out all salaries >$100k/yr, which might as well be a random sample. If the trend continues (reasonable assumption, but naive to take as fact) then it is reasonable to assume that managers (who we are assuming make more money than the median employee) are more conservative. But again, we just don't know.
The data you are linking to is actually irrelevant to the conversation at hand (it also has a huge yearly variance, making it even more noisy).
No, this is exactly WHY it is unreasonable. This is how conspiracy theories work. Humans want causal understandings but they have limited information and their imaginations fill in the gaps. If you have little information you should also have low confidence. Look around here at how many people are certain of conspiracy. Look in the Twitter thread too. Much of what people are saying is highly unreasonable and this is not healthy for us as a community.
That being said, yes they suppressed propaganda and disinformation that could lead to bodily harm (as on J6). People like Fox News hosts pushing disinformation that could lead to people dying over COVID is easily crossover into legal territory. Why would they want that shit on their platform? Is it their fault all the disinformation comes from right wing kooks?
This argument is ridiculous. It's like Nazis complaining their propaganda was being removed from the radio and their voice was being silenced.
There is no way to bend far enough to excuse what happened here.
Huh? Twitter does not administer US elections last I checked. I am sure people could read this hugely consequential information you're claiming on Reddit, 4chan, OANN, AM radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, or various other outlets that right-leaning voters typically seem to use. In fact, I seem to recall all of those running several stories about it at the time.
Or are you claiming that Twitter is the sole source of media that the entire United States consumes?
I would have thought at least the Hunter Biden laptop story pierced that bubble for most people recently by demonstrating these "right wing kooks' were the only ones NOT spreading misinformation.
Twitter benefits from network effects, which makes them immune to an extent from the normal rules of private-sector competition. Telephone carriers have to carry certain speech, your power company can't shut off your power because they don't like your speech, etc… Arguably the major social media platforms are in a similar position.
Twitter also colludes with government officials, as revealed in the previous "Twitter files" installment.
> they suppressed propaganda
I just checked the Twitter Rules [1], the Rules don't forbid "propaganda".
And I just checked the definition of "propaganda" [2], seems like it includes many things that nobody alleges is against the Rules (for example, any political ad, no matter what it advocates, is "propaganda").
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."
How is this any different than Elon's stated goals from 3 weeks ago?
Conservatives: Rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required
Fuck Joe Biden
Fuck your feelings
These are all t-shirt slogans you can buy at conservative political events, and they're quite widespread rather than exceptional.
Also conservatives: Why am I being shadow banned, this is viewpoint discrimination!
To be clear, there are obnoxious people and outright assholes all over the political spectrum. But conservatives have made outrage and offensiveness their brand, in recent years. I remember being astonished and disgusted by the gleeful antagonism of Rush Limbaugh back int eh 1990s when conservative talk radio first became A Thing following the Reagan administration's abolition of the 'Fairness doctrine.'
Both sides can certainly find a reason not to speak to each other. The left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene. It's always been like that, with one having the power to censor the other.
Here's an example [1]. One side, a well known entrepeneur/investor, is arguing for no censorship, and the other side, a well known disinformation researcher [2], argues for limits of the reach of certain content. One has blocked the other, so they no longer communicate directly.
Five years ago, someone at Twitter might have observed this interaction and decided, "I'm going to secretly action content. That will satisfy both the disinfo labeler and the anti-censorship crowd." Yet in doing so, as we can see, nobody is satisfied. They're still not talking to each other, and they don't understand why. The reason is due to the secrecy built into all of these platforms where an unknown third party is actioning content without anyone involved in the conversation knowing about it.
See also Free speech for me--but not for thee : how the American left and right relentlessly censor each other [3] (Nat Hentoff, 1992)
[1] https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1599532506252214272
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f...
[3] https://archive.org/details/freespeechformeb0000hent/page/n9...
Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you. Don't owe them a conversation or even a hearing.
I don't disagree with your characterization that 'the left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene.' But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats, and it's not a wholly new phenomenon. I put it to you that the people who are amused by and choose to promote messages like 'rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required' do not actually give a shit about free speech but are opportunistically employing the grievance for political leverage.
Get back to me on this when the right stops openly calling to murder people on such a frequent basis and I'll be happy to consider it in more abstract terms. I see why you're concerned about this, but having extensive first hand experience of political violence I think shadow bans are a relatively minor issue by comparison.
I never said there was. Even free speech law has limits and may punish such speech.
What I advocate is for authors of secretly removed content to be able to discover the removal, because even if the comment is vitriolic, the offending author may perceive the lack of a response as tacit approval of their words.
> But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats
Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1]. This is wrong, short of something that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", a definition from Nadine Strossen [2].
[2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...
It’s the Republican, Trump-appointed, FBI director’s assessment that extremist right-wing political violence (read homegrown right-wing terrorism) is far and away a bigger problem than left-wing violence.
Jan 6 I hoped would have demonstrated that clearly once and for all. After that day, it has become impossible to “both sides” political violence in the US — it really is asymmetrically coming from the right.
Regarding shadow moderation, I can promise you that every side of every issue in every geography and on every major platform uses it. See the talk linked in my profile for examples.
It's been 20 years and Americans have finally recently stopped harping on about "9/11", after decades of them murdering orders of magnitudes more innocents. It's incredible to see them committing some of worst attrocities in the world and still loudly yell about their own tiny issues.
It's a little odd to me that you contemplate hypotheticals like 'perceiving the lack of response as tacit approval.' It's not that this is incorrect, but that you're overlooking evidence of the alternative: when platforms like Twitter or FB leave posts up (to gather both argument and support) but attach some sort of note saying 'this post might be disinformation' or words to that effect.
That is what you are asking for, no? A clear signal that the social media post is disfavored by the platform operator in some way, such that the author is notified and given some context, and so is everyone else. I would appreciate if you would clarify whether or not this meets your desired standard of transparency.
The reason I bring this up is that when this approach is applied, authors of the controversial posts tend to hate it and still scream that they're being censored by being publicly shamed, or having words inserted into their social media post by the platform operator (notwithstanding the extremely obvious distinction.. Twitter has gone farther again by allowing users to add meta-commentary in the form of notes (previously birdwatch), but on controversial topics said notes are often railed against by the original author or the subject of meta-controversy by people trying to spam the note system with negative characterizations of the notes themselves.
If you're going to make transparency of moderation into your political cause (and you very much seem to approach it this way), then I think you should go all the way and address the questions of why people are not happy even when they get what you are advocating for, and just pivot to a slightly different variation of the same argument about how they're being censored and it's a terrible injustice etc.
Incidentally the definition in your 2nd link is not from Nadine Strossen; it's just a restatement of the prevailing legal standard for incitement (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) and indeed seems to be offered as such in the text. Like the 'true threat' doctrine, this definition is being interpreted in increasingly elastic fashion in our era of instantaneous mass communication.
I'm familiar with Strossen's book but also consider it to be written from a comfortable suite in an ivory tower. Like many well-intentioned idealists, she acknowledges the possibility of violence but argues that it must be met by reasoned debate and nonviolent resistance. I reject this posture, because it basically says people who are the target of violence should accept their role as punching bugs (or targets of gunfire) in exchange for the possibility of moving the conscience of elites who review circumstances, form policy, render decisions, and recognize peers (eg accepting or rejecting the validity of other states). In this mode of argument, willingness to passively sacrifice oneself is the threshold of acceptability - becoming famous for your advocacy and then dying for it like Christ, King, or Gandhi is the way to go. And conveniently, once people are dead they can be cited as moral exemplars without the troubling possibility of them reappearing and critiquing subsequent outcomes.
Oddly, I don't see Strossen or her peers throwing themselves in front of violent mobs in an attempt to bring them to moral clarity. Having at various times been arrested, attacked, beaten by a mob, and beaten by cops while engaged in wholly non-violent political activity, I do not give much weight to pure idealism that isn't grounded in cold hard reality.
This brings me back to your first link, which complains about transgender extremism and was ironically published on the first of April this year. Just in the last three weeks, we've seen a mass shooting at an LGBT club leaving 5 dead and a further 18 injured (Colorado Springs); multiple militant groups, openly armed, demonstrating against a drag queen story hour event while police looked the other way (Columbus, Ohio); well-organized attacks on electrical substations that left a whole county without power for days and happened to coincide with a drag show in the county seat (Moore County, North Carolina).
Now, my strategic assessment is that opposition to drag shows is often a convenient excuse for militant organizing and action, and if all LGBT people magically teleported away to Planet Fabulous tomorrow, the militant organizing and action would quickly pivot to some other scapegoat.
But please, don't waste my time with links about 'transgender extremism' and free speech issues unless you are willing to address the fact that those who oppose the acceptance and freedoms of LGBT folk are themselves engaged in the suppression of free speech and indeed life. I have yet to see any of the conservative/libertarian champions of free speech address the abundant right-wing attacks upon it, probably because they're scared of their own side.
And by address, I don't mean dismissing it with a truism like 'violence is illegal of course.' Rather, try providing evidence of how your preferred approach would mitigate actual and ongoing harms, and why havens of largely unrestricted speech (eg parts of 4chan) are not utopias of thoughtful discussion but rather cesspools of bigotry that celebrate and incite violence as a means to drown out discussion. It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.
It seems you feel that secretive online censorship is not a big deal. I don't see the point in trying to convince you. Plenty of other people, such as those I quoted here [1], do care.
If you'd like me to respond further, please narrow it down to a question or two.
> We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:
>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)
> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)
How was Twitter hiding this?
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
It prevents nefarious actors from easily probing the limits of their content moderation processes.
It really is funny how Musk is just taking Twitter back to the start.
I haven't seen anything here that indicates that it ever did exist.
Limiting reach is different from people not seeing your content at all.
Has someone compiled a dataset of users that appear to be shadowbanned, that tweet political content at least some of the time, as well as the political lean they have?
If we go up to the top comment in this chain we see
> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
- Elon Musk
So... you're in agreement?
(btw, this isn't shadowbanning. Shadow banning would be 0 likes and 0 retweets and 0 views)
> t is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.
Actually this is my entire complaint with these Twitter Files. They show examples of people getting delisted but do not show the tweets that led to these decisions. That is a CRITICAL element of the story. We can't determine if Twitter was acting in good faith or not without this knowledge. We also have no idea if these examples are selection biased or not. Probably since there's only right leaning stuff and thefp.com is a right wing organization. Maybe Twitter does have a left bias (it probably does) but we sure aren't getting a fair shake.
It is different because Elon's goals are at the level of tweets, and the screenshots here depict action at the level of users.
>New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
>Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
>You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
None of this info seems to warrant such a spectacle.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864
yes, it seems like twitter employees lied when asked directly about shadow banning and other issues.
Even if Twitter does the exact same actions, Musk will frame them all as"radical transparency"
ie "Even if this is wrong don't touch it"
Not my first thought when reading the words "no action whitelist" Yours?
With that in mind, I get the distinct impression that the LoTT account was being treated with kid gloves/white gloves.
The other inference that occurred to me is that multiple twitter departments pulled these levers and didn't always have one view on it - hence the "don't flippin' touch this" sign with the message on who to talk to. That's not there as an endrun around automation.
Does @LoTT belong to such distinguished company? I don't know, but I know this is not an instance of Twitter "silencing the voices on the right" despite the context of the reporting
This is clearly a case of a tipping the scales against a non-liberal voice and is being provided as an example of how these things worked.
Was the treatment deserved, justified, correct or not? This is the question. How arbitrary is it? How could that be abused to lose Hillary an election? (Or whoever). Was it? Most importantly how does this process fare when government officials and politicians make direct threats when making censorship demands?
I find this case a lot less interesting than finding out about the involvement of the fbi etc. I'm far more interested to see if and how Wikileaks stories were de-boosted or not as one controversial example. People claimed that blogging about Assange's court case suddenly got no Twitter referrals. Possible? If so, was it true? If so Why? Did Twitter employees put their thumb on the same to boost (or bury) Bernie?
All these things, i guess we'll see. I strongly doubt Taibi would be in on a cover up unless the CIA had him by the balls or similar, don't know much about Bari. We'll have a lot more confidence whatever comes out. Perhaps some of the people repeating (on twitter) how uninteresting it all is are worried it's too interesting? I'm fascinated to see how much or little was going on, how and why.
Who's angry? Who's not reading what disclosures? What are they angry about?
What. Why?
Next, I wonder, but don’t care enough to look it up, if this guy is adequately summarized by only mentioning his concern for children?
Screw that, I did look him up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya#COVID-19_pa.... He was one of the people behind the “Great” Barrington Declaration and, kn the early months of the pandemic, argued, among other things, that COVID is rather harmless. He also took money from the airline industry without disclosing as much in his publications.
It’s arguable if Bhattacharya’s reach needed to be limited. What’s really hard to argue is that the thing about children is an adequate characterization of his statements during the pandemic. This is prime evidence that this story is not presenting anything close to a fair interpretation of the documents they have been given, and that you have, unfortunately, fallen for it.
Even if they weren't, this would still be unacceptable.
What’s not debatable is that the breathless outrage-bait under discussion misrepresented the case for limiting the Dr’s reach with a straw-man argument, and so did you.
Could you help me understand what the argument is that this person should have been put on any form of blacklist?
medical & public health scientists: 15,989
medical practitioners: 47,278
concerned citizens: 870,827
The list of medical practitioners and scientists includes a number of homeopaths and obvious fake names.
You're off by an order of magnitude and then some. Also, none of the numbers they do claim are verifiable. https://gbdeclaration.org/view-signatures/
You know, when you make a specific claim like that it's really worth the 30 seconds it takes to check it again to verify your memory is correct.
>“It’s shaping up to be one of the highest-impact things that we’ve done,” the chief executive, Jack Dorsey ,said of the update, which will change how tweets appear in search results or conversations. “The spirit of the thing is that we want to take the burden off the person receiving abuse or mob-like behavior.”
> The new system will use behavioral signals to assess whether a Twitter account is adding to – or detracting from – the tenor of conversations...
> The updated algorithm will result in certain tweets being pushed further down in a list of search results or replies, but will not delete them from the platform.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/15/twitter-r...
These screenshots are about actions taken by Twitter employees, not an updated algorithm.
It's hard to make people care about this stuff. Most of us only start to see the harm of something when it's shown in context. Just showing that something can be theoretically harmful isn't enough.
The question is not what is getting demoted, it's how. In this case, it's being done secretly, and Twitter isn't the only one doing it:
It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...
More than 95% of the time I see a flagged account on HN, they post complete garbage that leads to more flaming replies if not removed promptly. HN has a very limited set of moderators, like one or two, who cannot police every comment 24/7.
>Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.
Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
Shadow moderation was implemented without doing any research. I agree it's about time more studies are done on all types of content and all platforms in order to assess whether or not this functionality furthers the platforms' goals.
> Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken
Good call. Blog post summarizing [1] and pdf [2]
> Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
All of them that don't use the ShadowBan add-on, I guess.
Indeed shadow moderation appears to have made platforms more popular. I won't disagree there. But I also think it's clear it has contributed to echo chambers and increased isolation and tribality.
I think we're reaching a point where the public wants to know what's going on in social media. Its harmful nature is not just driven by preference-driven news feeds, which we already know can be toxic, it's also driven by shadow moderation. That's the other shoe that may be dropping here.
[1] https://medium.com/acm-cscw/does-transparency-in-moderation-...
[2] https://shagunjhaver.com/research/articles/jhaver-2019-trans...
You could have just use the menu to find it, it only took a few seconds. There's a preprint available there if you need it. https://shagunjhaver.com/research/
I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (especially when almost all of them have a backup account).
And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?
I am glad that you agree that this is such a huge problem, and it is a good thing that now more people are away of how extensive it is.
Try working in integrity for a few years, you'll realise why these things are necessary, because people just won't stop being jerks.
So my point stands.
https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/16010379837793894...
A shadowban that the user clearly knows about sounds like an oxymoron.
The correct way to moderate is to be civil and treat "low quality" users as human beings. Reserve inhuman bans for inhuman users (bots).
As public online discourse becomes a more engrained part of normal society, shadowbans may even end up being an action that, in and of itself, end up being regulated and controlled. Shadowbans can help create a better and freer society for everybody, but they can also be used to create a dystopia. In some ways it's akin to a real world weapon. A firearm can be used to uphold and protected great values, but it can also be used to impose horrific ones.
Since when is getting a new phone number that receive SMS an insurmountable expensive? There are literally dozens, perhaps hundreds of services selling this. Example [1] https://www.textmagic.com/sms-pricing/ seems to cost me 7c per text received with no account fees, and I only need it to receive a sign up message.
That is far from "organized and funded". People paid $8 to make troll accounts on Twitter when it was possible.
You are correct that burning a SIM card is not that expensive.
However, your example of a text capable VOIP number is not a good one. FAANGs require a real mobile number and these texting services (twilio, for instance) will not work.
All of this to say:
It’s a bit more expensive than you think. If you really care about succeeding, you’re going to need to burn a SIM card.
The entire reason shadowbans exist and have existed for decades is because there's an inherently unsolvable problem with certain users that extremely fixate on certain users or communities. If you think they can be treated by being civil then I don't think you've been a moderator for any extensive period.
Perhaps it’s an issue with the definition of “shadowban”, but I understood it to mean “you tweet, but no one sees”. Letting a user know that their account is in this state for this_reason actually seems like an improvement to me, not an oxymoron.
> Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning or 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
The point of shadowbans/hellbans as they exist on say, reddit, is to deal with what would be termed criminally as a fixated person. If they know they're banned, they just make a new account, and another one after that, and another one - if they think they can't post they engage in ever more extreme measures to keep doing it.
A hellban is a solution here, or at least a relief valve because of course this person doesn't actually engage with the community or care to, they're their to grief it: so letting them continue to think they're posting normally while being invisible keeps them occupied until either they lose interest or somehow figure it out.
Moderators are a finite resource, and spending all their resources chasing down someone who won't take the hint is exactly what a hellban is for.
Why? Isn't this a signal to the broader population that certain behaviors result in this kind of downranking?
>Moderators are a finite resource, and spending all their resources chasing down someone who won't take the hint is exactly what a hellban is for.
Again, it's it useful to signal that accounts that violate the rules (or are right up at the edge of violating them) are in this state?
You didn't actually address the OPs claims and the reason why shadowbanning exists. Sometimes you get people that are literal stalkers, harassers. People that chase out other individuals. The problem is when you ban them you give them a clear signal that they are unable to post. So what do they do? They create a new account. Then they repeat the process.
Not informing them that they violated the rules is the entire point. The broader population already knows that these behaviors are bad. The problem is dealing with specific users that refuse to give up and refuse to go away. To them their account has zero value; a ban means nothing to them. Their value is based on dealing damage to other users of your community.
We should be building external systems that can check the visibility of our own content. It can be done with an extension, for example.
Even if they did it's clear that whoever made the screenshot in the libsoftiktok screen doesn't even have access to see their email. Like all other tech admin panels, there are access controls. Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Well, nothing looks greyed out. Again, I'm going to assume they had access unless there's specific information to the contrary.
[0] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601084794288640000
I feel that what we're seeing is largely investigation theater designed to validate a particular outcome rather than a real inquiry. If you consider this from an information/hybrid warfare point of view and think of Twitter as territory, then it's reminiscent of highly engineered plebiscites that precede or follow invasions to give them an aura of legitimacy.
Ian Miles Cheong :
> So here’s a question for @elonmusk and @bariweiss: were any political candidates — either in the US or elsewhere — subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?
Elon :
> Yes
> use an actual journalistic process
There is a journalistic process being followed - two established journalists have been given comprehensive access to internal files and are documenting what they have found, while putting their discoveries in context. Elon is also promising that these files will be released publicly for other journalists and the interested public to pore over at a later date.
> this could be verified with evidence
And who's saying it won't be? This was not Elon volunteering this information himself. This was simply him replying in the affirmative to a question put to him. (And no, it was not a 'leading question'.)
> he hides behind his disdain
> questions that only serve to rile up his base
Not worth replying to these. Just quoting as examples of your bad faith.
I'm pretty sure he'll release this publicly à la "wikileak" to everyone after the exclusivity on Twitter has worn off.
Ahhh yes, posting tweets on Twitter is "putting their discoveries in context". Normally journalists provide context by writing in depth articles after they have formed all their thoughts.... and maybe even have it reviewed by an editor.
>And who's saying it won't be? This was not Elon volunteering this information himself. This was simply him replying in the affirmative to a question put to him. (And no, it was not a 'leading question'.)
Then say the name. If he knows it happened, then take the .5 second to type out 10 or more characters and name a name. OR say something like "Yes, I'll get a list shortly". But no, he gives a snide 'yes'. Which only furthers to rile up the mouth frothers. It's so immature.
Is Elon's true motivations to shine sunlight at the old twitter or is it to put on another dog and pony show? Because he is failing at the former and not even trying to disguide the latter. I am interested in understanding more about twitter's past and most importantly CURRENT policies. Ideally in a more neutral tone. Elon's stated new policies seem pretty familiar with the old ones. With the one difference I am currently seeing is that sometime in the future, one might be able to see if their account is being "shadowbanned" or not.
No, sorry, but there's no way I can see how that stance is reasonable.
I have no doubt Part 3 will be forthcoming, and if it unequivocally points to that, I will sit up and take note.
That said, all of this drama is for something that is now dead. That is, Twitter is dead as a platform for political discourse. Even given the previous Twitter administration's apparent overmoderation of rightwing voices, it was still the loudhailer for what was almost an overthrow of the US government. For better or for worse, those shackles have been removed. November 2023 and on may see a replay, and the loudhailer has no filter anymore.
Baseless conspiracy theory.
My hyperbole was not necessary, you're right, but one can't say EM doesn't have disdain for MSM - he says it almost every day.
Musk feels the same way about Alex Jones — who was part of a civil and not criminal action. What he did was immoral but not illegal. I’m glad we have a system to address the harm he did but disappointed in Musk that he can’t apply the same standard beyond Jones.
As another sibling comment states, other platforms also do similar things. It's easy how such systems get started and evolve. In fact, given the severe downvoting I see on this and similarly polarizing threads on HN, I think if someone built a browser extension that hides comments by users from a user created list many people HN users would probably use it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-acces...
A more pressing question, IMO: one of the screenshots shows a “direct messages” button. Does Weiss and/or Taibbi have unrestricted access to read users DMs right now?
Now that would be interesting.
https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/justin-...
the head of twitter security testified to Congress how twitter had poor security controls and audibility across the company. If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions.
Let’s stay focused on the important details rather than worrying about established journalists exposing the power the former twitter employees wielded to sway public opinion
How many employees have access to the tool? Do all users see that button? Seems pretty likely they’d have tiered access levels, no? What if access to user DMs was a hugely restricted piece of functionality and Musk just said “screw it” and gave it to two non-employees on a whim?
You’re writing off a potentially huge breach in user trust, not to mention legal repercussions.
you are pushing fake news to distract from the core abuses, all to protect liberal interests
You’ve also not explained why an audience like HN is incapable of discussing multiple issues in a discussion forum. Do you really think everyone here is so dumb?
Let’s be real here: you don’t want any discussion that strays from the talking points dished out by Weiss because such discussion would show her talking points are largely nonsense. The Twitter Files is a house of cards but as long as the right people keep saying it isn’t the audience will keep huffing it like glue.
the new head of twitter trust & safety notes she provided screenshots of the internal service to the journalists
please continue trying to distract with the fake news; the liberal house of cards are falling down and I’ve got my popcorn out
One of the journalists in question. Also the wording in your tweets leaves some wriggle room:
> For security purposes, the screenshots requested [...]
Are we going to get some transparency from Twitter about exactly what tools/communications were accessible by the journalists in question? Otherwise this seems to be an exact repeat of what Twitter has already been doing for years, except now it's a private company and accountable to only one absurdly rich individual.
These aren't far right or left, it's everyone. Likely all of us have been secretly moderated at some point without our knowledge.
When I discovered this happening on the platform I used, I built a tool to let me know when it happened, and I published that tool for others to use. Now it sees 500k users per month. Similar tools could be built for all other sites that do this.
HN also gives you an option to see this content in your account settings (showdead = yes).
"There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed"
<Shows Evidence with receipts>
"This is old news, nothing new here."
Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?
Wait, where is this one?
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take coordination to know that shadowbans exist. It's spoken openly on Twitter, there are tools to test accounts, etc. It's not surprising because it's open knowledge. No political persuasion necessary to be in the know here.
I'm sure this is true. But the claim is that there's some politically-inclined motivation to it all.
Twitter admits to limiting visibility of posts.
So the dispute becomes a spectrum/threshold question. Most people would say that if 10% of the people who would normally see your posts get to see them, that's pretty shadowban-y. And most people would agree that if 90% get to see your posts, that's more like "limiting visibility" than shadowbanning.
The key questions are: (1) to what extent was visibility reduced, and (2) at what threshold should we consider "limiting visibility" to be tantamount to a shadowban?
There are also indirect effects to consider: if your posts are shown to only 60% of the people of a normal post, then you will get fewer RTs and fewer new followers in the long run. So consistent "visibility limitation" has a compounding effect that could substantially slow your account growth and reach over time.
People were certainly made fun of for implying that they were shadow banned (in the sense that they were more suppressed than the average user) and tons of people would outright deny it was even happening.
The reaction to this drop, which just describes how any moderation system at scale works/would need to work, is a nice confirmation of that belief.
"They have a secret blacklist!!"
It's a database.
They have a database.
Terminal for each user showing their Shadowbanned status. And ability to appeal against it.
It'll be called something different, or framed in some different way of course.
HN after post on some user getting booted off Stripe: This is not normal. Why is Stripe doing this?
Nevertheless, thank you for linking that tweet. It's an important one for clarification of the process that is being followed, and the care being taken.
Facebook gives mods a "Hide comment" button [2]
TikTok calls it "visible to self" [3] [4]
Truth Social does it [5] [6] [7]
Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8]
Open source tools are built to do it [9] [10]
Textbooks advocate "disguise a gag or ban" [11]
I call it Shadow Moderation [12]. The system intentionally does not show users the ways in which their content has been actioned. The solution is simple— provide users with the same view that the moderating system has. Whenever their content has been actioned, let users see it.
It may be the result of two groups who fail to connect. Those who don't want any censorship at all, and those who want disinformation to be handled by the platform. If there is no olive branch and no concession made between these two positions, then platform designers may seek to satisfy both by secretly actioning content.
If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content.
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601014175366402048
[2] https://www.agorapulse.com/blog/hide-comments-on-facebook/#o...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
[4] https://netzpolitik.org/2019/cheerfulness-and-censorship/
[5] https://www.tiktok.com/@cheyenne.l.hunt/video/71115053899502...
[6] https://www.citizen.org/article/truth-cant-handle-the-truth/...
[7] https://www.tiktok.com/@cheyenne.l.hunt/video/71118581026385...
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/comments/zdubov/wri...
[9] https://getstream.io/blog/feature-announcement-shadow-ban/
[10] https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-shadowban/85041
[11] https://kraut.hciresearch.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ki...
[12] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.
> ...what is the supposed rationale for making you think a removed post is still live and visible?
> ...So the mods delete comments, but have them still visible to the writer. How sinister.
> ...what’s stunning is you get no notification and to you the comment still looks up. Which means mods can set whatever narrative they want without answering to anyone.
> ...Wow. Can they remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed?
As the thread says, Twitter used a bit of trickery by calling it "visibility filtering" so they could lean on the technicality that "we do not shadow ban", because they too preferred to leave in some plausible deniability.
If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!
Like yes, social media platforms can moderate content and decide how it appears, or doesn't appear, under whatever arbitrary criteria they want, and they don't need your approval first. That isn't news at eleven, I guarantee it was spelled out in the terms of service no one ever bothered to read.
The use of this stuff is probably in the companies' terms of use, patents etc. The public is still largely unaware that it happens, as evidenced with Twitter.
There is nothing to stop large platforms from using shadowban features to fuel corrupt activity for profit and influence if they continue to operate in non-transparent ways like this.
lol, you had me going for a moment there.
Interesting you bring this up though because tweets mentioning .win domains still get shadow removed, even today with the new owner.
This Tweet [1] only appears when directly linked. It does not appear beneath its parent [2] for anyone but me.
[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136
[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553
Does it make sense for Twitter to shadow remove tweets from a whole TLD? The fact that it needs to be done secretly is evidence that most users don't know that using such a TLD will "create a negative impression".
Again, you're not a customer. The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
And then you get into a situation where it can be alleged that a whole political ideology, half the country, has been sidelined by your secretive work.
Short term, that worked for awhile. It is not a long term strategy.
> you're not a customer
Users are part of the product. Lying to them en masse is not a good way to build trust.
> The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
I guess you've never tried to say something that the majority didn't want you to say, as has happened many times throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to Anthony Comstock to Communism to McCarthy to the Civil Rights Era.
Free expression is held in regard not just when dealing with government, but also when dealing with each other. Shouting over each other isn't considered civil discourse, and neither is censorship wherever it occurs, in private or public places.
I've been jailed twice, stabbed, kicked in the head, had my ribs broken, and hit with a wide variety of chemical agents, at the hands of both police and mobs, all while engaged in non-violent political activity. To me, you sound naïve, at best.
This is not true. There are cases where comments are silently removed without any public indicator; To the author, it appears as if the comment is posted normally. To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
> To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
This is another important detail, so thank you for bringing it up. Removed leaf comments (comments with no children) do not show any marker at all. I mention it in my talk at 1:23 [2],
> Note that other users only see one marker here. They are not shown a marker for replies that have no children. So there is no indication to them that there was even a second comment here. The vast majority of removed comments fall into this category. Anything removed automatically for containing a phrase or link from a subreddit's ban list has no chance of receiving a reply.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/random
[2] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
I use reveddit a lot on threads but never thought to use it on my own account. Thank you for making such a useful tool!
No sweat. FYI there's also an extension for alerts, linked below. My main goal was to alert people to their own removed content. I'd love to know if there's a better way to route users in this direction. There's currently a little note in a blue box that appears if you've never visited a user page.
The problem is you assume every actor is rational. That they all want to simply post in good faith. The moment you make that assumption you become a fool, someone that will be manipulated and controlled. You will get people gaslighting you into thinking they're the heroes while they've been sending threats of violence to other members of your community.
There is no good solution. I doubt there will ever be a good solution because it's trying to solve an inherent problem in the human condition.
Also, Reveddit is used extensively on Reddit without subreddits falling apart. Mods of many groups will often link it to provide transparency into their work.
"New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."
[0] - https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
Very hard to buy that the platform was a political tool of Democrats when it was being used effectively as a political tool by the leader of the Republican party.
All you’ve done here is confirmed that Trump, a conservative right-wing politician, got treated better by the supposedly biased left-wing Twitter mods than anyone else on the platform. He violated the Twitter TOS daily and got a free pass over and over again by Twitter mods. Really cuts against the “left-wing bias” narrative you’re pushing here imo.
There readers have also expressed outrage at the objectionable activities and raised concerns with whoever would listen.
It's a shame that he's choosing to go about it in this way. Releasing things in a slow drip via two uhhhh lets say highly polarizing pundits is bad for transparency. Everything people are seeing is first filtered through and framed by these two people. Wouldn't it be better to simply release the raw data all at once and let people comb through it? I know he says he's going to do that later, but why not now?
It's also fact there are brigades and bots operating on HN and NGAF.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
"Does Twitter shadow ban? Let’s discuss this one upfront. Simply put, we don’t shadow ban! Ever. We do rank Tweets to create a more relevant experience for you, however, and you’re always able to see Tweets from people you follow. Check out our company blog post for more details."
and news articles from earlier, such as
2022-05-03 https://www.wral.com/fact-check-hannity-says-elon-musk-bid-e...
It's only an hour old. The post must've been flagged, which I know has a pretty heavy influence on the ranking here.
For those flagging, this conversation is worth having. Whether platforms secretly demote people's content is important to them.
But account-level shadowbans are sort of known to exist. What's being reported here is harder to detect. That is, the secretive removal of individual pieces of content, or reducing the reach of an account's content.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8z3sd4/i_have_used_red...
Like, I'd love to know how they implemented the "Trends Blacklist". In the years older leak I had assumed that it was on the trending terms, but Weiss revealed that it was targeting people and tweets.
Or the "Search blacklist". That's basically sabotaging your own search function so that things that are popular/relevant/trending are hidden. That makes no sense for an platform to even do for anything other than censorship of people on purpose.
Or what does "Do Not Amplify" do? Does that mean they do amplify other things, but never want these accounts to be amplified by that process? How was that implemented?
Musk just tweeted: "Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal"
That'll be good to see. Exposing this stuff to the people affected is just...good faith interaction with your users. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be justifiably mad. I wonder what this will do to twitter's stock price...
When you submit with the same link, HN brings you to the post.
I'm pretty into this topic, having spent the last four years trying to raise awareness about it. First I thought it was only one political side abusing it, then I thought it was only Reddit, and this summer I realized it was happening on every platform. I suppose others have known for longer but FWIW this is a talk I gave on what I know [1], and an HN discussion on it [2]. See also my other comment in this thread about where else it happens [3].
It's hard to figure out how to tell the story about what's going on because it keeps expanding. I've learned something new about this almost every day for a long time. I think it does boil down to a single point though, which may be treat others how you want to be treated. That doesn't always win out in the real world, but it does when the issue is big enough.
[1] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
I saw it in the HN Telegram feed. Stories that get taken down here remain on the feed.
It is an important topic but the Twitter thread linked is not a particularly useful resource. For one, none of this is new information:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-acces...
That it’s being brought out now with such fanfare smells like corporate propaganda.
It is news to many when social media takes action against content without telling the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519
If we're now saying that statement is bad then we should hold his feet to the fire. Conflicting statements doesn't mean there is no principle to espouse; it just means there are conflicting statements.
HN homepage is incredibly brigaded, but since it's in line with admins opinions they don't do anything about it.
How can tech self-regulate itself, or should there be external agencies who would watch the growing power of tech companies? and who would watch them?
Decentralization never seems to take off, so we seem to be left with these existing players like twitter, meta, google ...who are de-facto monopolies....
Would it be a stretch to suggest 'the government'?
I'm from the US though so not an expert or it's laws.
Similar laws could be expanded to other major communication platforms.
They specifically said in their communications that LibsOfTikTok hadn’t violated any rules directly. Why the suspensions then?
Random thought; This would likley make for a fun board game concept.
Players are tasked with design societal rules.. and then woops, spin the dice and are now confronted by the rules they set for themselves.
Also they cite these right wing personalities being suppressed but honestly there are so many of them, of course some will be flagged. I'm pretty left leaning and I'm struggling to even think who would be the leftwing equivalents of some of these names. We don't really coalesce around political personalities so who would there be to get flagged?
The presentation of these details is being done in such an overtly gleeful right-wing manner that it's hard to take it in objectively.
Elon and others seem to be pitching these releases as huge bombshells about conservatives being silenced. I haven't seen any evidence for that claim at all. The most detailed analysis we've got so far was a spreadsheet of employee political donations. Maybe they are building up to it?
Twitter lied about their activities, and they targeted conservatives and the political right. Those are facts. Inexcusable.
Elon is pro-regulation in a non-deceitful manner. He's solving the problem.
Recently I don't see this thread on the first 10 pages. Now it's appeared on page 7. It should be more visible with the number of upvote and comment, shouldn't it?
The Twitter Files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838556 - Dec 2022 (1549 comments)
The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33915734 - Dec 2022 (481 comments)
... and it's quite normal. It happens with every sensational or inflammatory story, especially the Major Ongoing Topic kind: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
We don't have any interest in censoring this—it's being moderated the same way we moderate anything else in this category, regardless of which way the political vectors point.
You guys are cherry-picking a tiny and arbitrary sample of datapoints—i.e. what you happen to notice, when you happen to be looking, which is (1) a tiny time sample, and (2) strongly influenced by how you feel about the story. Other people who look at different times and/or feel differently notice different things and come to completely different conclusions. Then you (some of you, at least!) turn those unreliable, sample-biased and feeling-influenced observations into flaming arrows and fire them at the mods—the same mods, btw, who turned off the flags on the story in the first place.
The media is ignoring or downplaying this story. Reddit is ignoring or downplaying this story. https://www.allsides.com/story/free-speech-second-twitter-fi... shows clear bias in covering the story.
It's kinda hard to argue that there's not a massive bias in big tech: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
Why is tech overwhelmingly Democrat-donating/leaning? Even more interesting, perhaps.. There are 4-5 companies with a significant Republican presence, but at first glance I can't figure out what they have in common. Oracle? Old company. Intel? Old company. HP? Old company. Uber. WTF? And not Salesforce?! Not even eBay. Neither tech nor company age explain the majority.
There's a sociological phenomenon here I lack the skills/data to figure out, but it is very interesting.
Twitter claimed to be a user-driven platform (not counting bots of course) where user actions would dictate what was popular and what went viral, but now there are some questions about just how controlled such events were. Questions like "How much of the this was stage-managed?" and "How much was bot-driven?" deserve answers.
The episodic format of this - alongside being forced into exclusive twitter threads when it would be much more easily understood as a longer article or series of paragraphs - also comes across as a pretty blatant and desperate attempt by Musk to make twitter "the #1 source of news"
Oh, wait!
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
I want to know WHY these people were flagged.
Without that being said I can't read these (and the previous posts) as any more than propaganda. It has a right wing bias and that feeds into a prior narrative but we all know that social media is amazing at causing selection bias. If they really want to show that Twitter's prior policies favored the left wing then they need to show more data and fewer direct examples. There's been this narrative that most employees at Twitter are left wing therefore filters target right wingers but that is naive unless we assume all Twitter employees' voices are equal and equally contribute to the creation of these filters.
This isn't so much whistleblowing as it is propaganda. Musk wants to drive eyeballs and the master of hype is doing what he does best. Lord around a nothing burger and promises the moon. He's just using that right wing prior that many have and exploiting that with selection bias without actually demonstrating that there is a bias.
> 3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
Using science or using propaganda? The issue, as I'm trying to make as abundantly clear as possible, is that we still don't know what the offending tweet says. Therefore we cannot actually conclude if the down weighting was appropriate or not. If he said "I have a paper which shows that under lockdown children are performing worse on tests" then I'd be upset. But if he said "The lockdown is harming our children and turning them into literal Nazis" then yeah, I do want that taken down. I'm just unwilling to speculate as to what the tweet actually said. You're putting at lot of trust in The Free Press[0], a new (self admitted) press organization that has little history[1]. In an age of misinformation we have to be constantly asking ourselves "do I believe this information because it is accurate or because it fits my preconceived notions (priors)?" Be critical of these people too. If what they are saying is true, then fair critique, as I've laid out, will roll off of them and truth will be on their side. If they aren't saying what is true, then do we also not have a duty to speak up when we find flaws in their arguments? If you want a free and fair media, we have to be able to criticize and evaluate our internal biases.
[1] Google them. Literally googling "thefp" doesn't come up with them. They do not seem to be associated with the advocacy group The Free Press. And one of their sources has uses MD in their username, claims in the bio that they aren't a doctor and it is their initials, ShellenbergerMS is not a taken username... Looking these individual people up, we do find a specific political bias and not a uniform one like their website claims.
What exactly are you insinuating?
I just checked the Twitter Rules [1], they don't forbid "propaganda".
And I just checked the definition of "propaganda" [2], seems like it includes many things that nobody alleges is against the Rules (for example, any political ad is "propaganda").
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
[0] I should mention that bad faith responses even violated HN's own rules. Though this is not often used (as evidence by this entire post) but is used to encourage high quality discussions. Let's try to have one.
> We can't draw any strong conclusions without knowing the actual post that resulted in the ban.
We don't know what the post in question is, because Twitter is not transparent and shadowbans people without telling them why. With no evidence to the contrary, we should presume Dr. Bhattacharya innocent.
So Twitter made this claim. FP didn't deny it either fwiw.
> With no evidence to the contrary, we should presume Dr. Bhattacharya innocent.
While I'm a big fan of Blackstone's Ratio you need to recognize that I am not accusing him of anything. He's not on trial here, the FP is. My claim is that these Twitter Files are propagating controversy without providing any substantial evidence. Dr. Bhattacharya is only part of this conversation because YetAnotherNick claimed that the post about him was direct evidence of manipulation. Which, if you read back, I said that this sample is not informative since we do not know what led to the ban. Without that evidence we don't know if Twitter acted in good faith or not.
Again, Dr. Bhattacharya is not on trial. Proof of his innocence would help The FP's argument, so why are they hiding it? The same is true for __every single one of the samples given__. We have ZERO information about the content that was posted that led to the actual down-weighting and bans. Because this information is being _intentionally_ hidden from us we must be suspicious of The FP's motives here. If you visit their website I'm sure you'll find a bias that strongly correlates with the claims they are making here: Twitter devalues right wing voices. Problem is, the claim still has no evidence. Just correlations. But these are not the same thing and that's why people are fighting in the comments. There is absolutely no information given that can allow us to draw accurate _causal_ solutions.
Don't confuse criticism with political hackery.
I think you should refresh your time zones knowledge.
But yeah, Northamerican leftists are not awake yet.
If a piece of content is moderated, it should remain in place and be clearly labeled with an explanation from the TOS.
Exceptions: If the moderated content is spam it can be collapsed. If it's illegal, it can be removed.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-reach...
The only new info I learned was Libs of TicTok apparently got special protections not afforded to regular users
1. It's not happening.
2. It's happening, but it's equally applied.
3. It's not equally applied and that's a good thing.
4. We already knew about it. Why is this news?
^---- You are here.
"Fascist do it, but it's justifiable when we do it because we are moral and the ends justify our means. We're moral because our name is literally antifascist!"