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If this truly is an attempt at censorship, it seems that shadow banning could have been just as effective and harder to detect. Maybe they could even secretly add a generic has_negative_sentiment_towards_an_elon_company modifier to their ranking algorithm and dial the outreach of such tweets way way down, in similar vein to author_is_elon.

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Indeed, but Elon's Twitter is a case study in low effort trolling.

For example, Twitter manually override the blue check system to make it look like critics had purchased it. Then someone realized changing their name would clear the checkmark. After dozens of iterations of Dril changing his name and having the checkmark manually re-added someone at Twitter thought to disable changing his name.

At every step of the way they used the shittiest possible solution. I'm unsurprised the pattern continues.

There's no reason to think Musk doesn't doomscroll Twitter looking for negative stuff about him to nuke. There doesn't have to be a galaxy brain plan here.

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