Shadowbanning Is Real
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If you do have that ability, please do. You only need access to one of the two sources to determine the answer.
There was an article[1] about Facebook manipulation of users news feeds, and I had just joined the company. So, I looked into it, and found without much effort the dataset and analysis of that experiment. One of the fields was "CauseOfDeath" and one of the analyses was that feeding a user all negative news created some whole-digit percentage increase in the suicide rate of users. This was presented matter-of-factly, and none of my coworkers seemed to see a problem with this.
Many of Facebook's experiments would never pass a IRB. Actually, that's not true at all: modern IRBs have been stacked with the same kind of monsters. Facebook would never pass a sane and functional IRB.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/... is the one I found with a quick search, though there were a few dozen in quick succession over that time period; I think by timing it was probably one of the articles written in response to their apology that actually came to my attention first.
It would be likely be quite telling if a paid ad was perhaps run from a shadowbanned account? Would the stats then be fake? Or could any message get a pass for money?
HN also does it.
We live in a no trust world now where credibility is a thing of the past. There's a reason google removed the do no evil part of the mission statement.
They were and are doing real evil.
what is pro-ana? pro anorexia?
Defeats the purpose of shadow banning...
Browse HN with showdead on and check out some of the shadowbanned posters. You can find many with long histories of "dead" comments that keep posting anyway.
On e.g. Twitter you can find all sorts or people saying random stuff and getting zero likes. They wouldn't necessarily notice either.
And try reading the comments section of a Fox News story. No way most of these people know or probably even care if they're banned, it's more like a tic than actually engaging in a conversation or even real trolling.
Shadowbanning is effective at increasing the SNR against essentially casual vandalism. Against deliberate trolls, the kind of people who are regularly checking from a logged out browser to see if their posts show up, not so much.
it harms the site as well, not only it's users. just look at whats happened to the ghost town formerly known as reddit.
Detecting user's ban evasion is to engage in a costly cat and mouse game between evaders and detectors. Shadow banning, however, is easy to implement and cost effective. Platforms that do it save resources compared to those that don't.
Your comment reads like you don't like that platforms have more power than users and you resent that it's not an even playing field. That's a fair point, but it would be easier to say that if that's how you feel.
Using it on actual people was never recommended, because it was always very obvious to anyone who actually engaged with the site. They'd go back to the same old threads on another computer and find their posts were gone, which was incredibly obvious. This just created more forum controversy, e.g. back when pj of Groklaw started doing it back in the day to suppress differing opinions on that TurboHercules controversy.
My theory is that the bots keep posting because there are enough "legit" bots that pull HN data from the API to put into an assortment of search engines and other statistical tools that ultimately Google and Bing will crawl those links from the secondary sites pulling data from HN. I could be wrong but the only other explanation is that the bots are just incredibly poorly coded. At least I can't think of another reason. I have no idea if the legit bots using HN's API have showdead enabled. If they do that could be part of the problem.
I say this having fought bots in the past on forums and the bot operators would certainly know if their posts were no longer visible to others so they would just keep creating new accounts. I would block IP's, then they would use proxies. I would block proxies, they would use Tor. I would block Tor then they would just create a few accounts a day then let them "warm up" with real content. This led me to putting people into "ranks" and only people that had been interacting with the site could post messages that could be read real time, whereas low rank accounts had to be moderator approved. I had SQL code in a cron job that would delete posts over 30 days old in the newbie rank if I did not get around to deleting them manually.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aaron695
My theory is that such users do know their status but just figure it doesn't matter and that people like me--who absolutely browse the site with showdead and would want all my friends to as well, as I don't want to not hear what someone says merely because they got angry--do read their content, and people like us are their true audience.
The "shadow ban" on Twitter that's garnering so much attention was manual down ranking of content. I'm not even sure if it's productive to call this shadow banning. Some content is given more visibility by the algorithm than others. Nobody is surprised by this. The main distinction in Twitter is that the downranking was manual, done to specific accounts. This realistically can't be detected, not evaded since abandoning a popular Twitter account is not an option. And for famous people, the downranking would be applied to their new account anyway.
They also know that they can run a separate window in private mode to view their own posts for suspected shadow-banning, and then create new accounts easily if they need to, at a minimum, it easily expands in scale to a VPN and beyond with minimal effort.
As for the consequences, if you strip individual people of voice and have done it for years without telling them, it tends to have only a few different outcomes, nothing positive in every respect. Voice is directly tied to agency, they stop reacting, stop providing anything of value, stop being generous, anywhere, some tend to have self esteem issues, and some become radical. These are the natural outcomes of marginalized individual.
Shadow-banning is a stupid idea put forth by stupid people with a spectacular lack of vision, and pushes a philosophy that has no future.
That philosophy being the same as identity politics under Mao, that the group is paramount, and the individual isn't important.
Any entity participating in this is effectively supporting the spread of socialist/communist philosophy, while conveniently ignoring the downsides.
We know in the context of communities that the presence of knowledgeable and actively engaged individuals make or break communities.
Moderation is important, shadow-banning isn't the way to do it.
Having anyone stripping the agency or voice of someone else without their knowledge, is an act of true evil regardless of the circumstances about how that came about.
Those that authorized and performed the work in case of automated systems, to make the system happen are equally responsible.
If you've read any serious history, you would know this is how evil works. Its usually about putting a system in place in a way that people blindly follow which separates individual tasks from the overall actions, and gives plausible deniability to the people who support often unknowingly in exchange for food/wages. This is how great acts of evil often come about.
Its what has happened in WW2, East Germany (Stasi), USSR, Vietnam (Hue), and China (Mao), and probably the US in the not so distant future given some of the secret systems the Snowden leak showed that are in place now and the general lack of public transparency in the past 20 or so years.