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Comment by saw-lau | Hacker News Reader

I've never come across the term 'heavy VF' before - can somebody clue me in?

From my read of the “Twitter Files” I hey have multiple levels of ways to reduce a tweets reach. Not allowing a tweet to trend, not show up in Search etc. I believe the “heavy” part refers to how many, and how hard these levers are pulled.

I think this is the first public occurrence of this term. Supposedly there are couples more that are independently named by users.

Mea culpa! I've edited my comment to fix this.

("visibility filtering")

VF = Visibility Filtering = "Shadow Banning"

Used to be another "conspiracy theory" yet again proven to be true.

The sloppy definitions allow all sorts of stupid conspiracy theories to be "proven true" when they clearly aren't. Twitter's always limited reach of accounts, that's been in their TOS for 4+ years:

https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/tweet-visibi...

The conspiracy theory that Twitter shadow banned accounts to a level in which even people looking for their Tweets couldn't find them, remains false. Everything that everyone Tweets is visible to everyone who looks at their Timeline. This is explicitly how Musk promised to run the service, "Freedom of speech, not reach" and is basically how Twitter has operated for years with the exception that old Twitter banned people who repeatedly violated the TOS.

No, everyone knew that this system existed for quite some time. The site's UI even surfaces it by hiding some filtered tweets behind a "view more" button. The conspiracy theory is that the feature was used specifically to silence conservatives for their political views, or that huge conservative accounts that showed up everywhere were somehow suffering from it when their latest brain enhancement pill sale didn't go well enough.

Oh really, "everyone knew" ? Apparently not certain journalists, like Matt Binder below, or not even Twitter execs at the time back in 2018 when Trump claimed conservatives were shadow-banned... Classic from the left: "first, ridicule it. Second, strongly challenge it. Finally, pretend this has always been the case and every one knew". Clearly in phase 3 here with yet another fakenews from leftits...

Matt Binder: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601142989061246976/pho...

Tweeter Execs denying: https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-shadow-banning-republicans-...

Yeah, the Twitter execs specifically denied that they apply filters based on political views. From your own link:

> To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views

The "conspiracy theory" is that Twitter was deliberately targeting conservatives for their politics, not that the site had moderation functions.

"The practice of shadow banning essentially involves making posts visible only to the person who created them and invisible to their intended audience"

There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.

I think it's helpful to emphasize that "Visibility Filtering" and "Shadow Banning" since they are functionally the same thing, but seem to have very different connotations depending on whether the speaker considers the action to be merited. As many on this forum know, one of the oldest and best ways to limit spam or other unwanted user behavior is to hide the content without informing the user, in order to slow down the arms race between bad actors and moderators.

Thanks, seri4l!

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