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Comment by adamwk | Hacker News Reader

I agree that colloquially it's definition can be looser depending on context, but it's in bad faith that Weiss[0] quotes Twitter's then Head of Policy and Trust as saying Twitter doesn't shadow ban people when in the very blog post[1] she's quoting they clearly define shadow banning as, "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."

[0]: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601013855697588224

[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

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> "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."

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

Shadow banning was not built to deal with bots. The practice was popularized in various communities long before bots were a serious problem.

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 think that might have been its original purpose, but I can't help but believe that this is evil.

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.

Platforms say it's for spam [1], which most people interpret to mean bots.

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...

You can look up the Wikipedia article on the practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

It has a fairly rich history, and evolution, as well as counter-measures, and counter-counter-measures and counter-counter-counter-measures.

That article barely scratches the surface of what's going on. Reddit alone has tons of secretive ways to remove or hide content, some of which I list here [1]. Others I mention in my talk [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...

[2] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/

I'm talking about the origination and evolution of a specific practice, called, specifically, "shadow banning".

Yes, other techniques exist. Sometimes people, being imprecise, ignorant and/or lazy, call those techniques "shadow banning", but that isn't what they are.

> 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.

You are vastly stretching the definition of shadowbanning if you're posting a public link that everyone (even people who aren't logged in to Twitter) can see, and then claiming that it's suppressed because it doesn't show up in the replies of a totally different account's Tweet.

It's not a stretch, and it fits the definition Twitter provided. You wouldn't be able to find the tweet unless I'd linked it. It's shadow detached from the parent.

Personally I prefer the term shadow moderation.

FYI, I think your tweet must be hidden if the user is logged out.

I'm logged in, and can see your tweet in the replies just fine. Still not shadowingbanning.

You're mistaken. I tweeted twice, once with the .win link, once without. The one with the .win link does not appear even when logged in as a different username. It does appear for me when I'm logged in as the same username.

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...

I just want to thank you for creating reveddit.

They explicitly say they don't shadowban people. Pattern matching for moderation is a completely different thing.

The public is still going to interpret that as shadow moderation of people's content.

Shadowbanning people means banning people, it's obviously separate from moderation of individual tweets. AFAIK the only subreddit that has banned me was the_donald, but I can obviously have my content removed if I post to a news subreddit from domains they consider unacceptable.

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.

Would most people consider an account shadow banned when it can post as normal, yet its post are secretly set to have near zero visibility? The answer is self evident. Twitter tried to redefine shadowbanning to something they do not do, and then put out a post saying they don't shadowban. That is engaging in extremely bad faith. Using the definition as normally understood, is not.

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 doesn't matter what "most people" would consider, because Twitter provided their definition of the term at the time. People disagree about all sorts of terms, and that's totally fair, but what Weiss is doing is retconning her own personal definition of the term on Twitter's policy statements, which were unambiguous. She is, in turn, being unambiguously dishonest.

It's interesting how selective people are about the supposed Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Right, Twitter provided their own definition which delicately tiptoes around the unsavory issue and Weiss expanded the definition to suit her own self-interests.

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.

Agreed, it's rare for any service to outright say "we shadow ban" as done here [1] for example.

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/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414

Because the thread is about Weiss's claims. If you want to talk about how Twitter's definition of shadow-banning is problematic, or their moderation practices in general, start another top-level thread.

> yet its post are secretly set to have near zero visibility

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.

Isn't near zero visibility the norm for most users?

I have been shadowbanned on Twitter and it is very different, even with no followers. I don't even know what caused it but it might have been reporting a person who was inciting violence (who subsequently committed said violence). Ever since then Twitter has been blocked on my network.

Do they have anything about how they were blacklisting accounts, unbeknownst to the original poster?

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