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.
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.
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.