Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

utkusen.substack.com

389 pointshn1986189 comments

I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years).

Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...

It was indeed more selective before Elon https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter

Am I reading it correctly that there are no instances on that wikipedia after Elon's purchase (other than the Substack incident?)

This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.

Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.

>Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies

Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.

Elon Musk stirred the pot in the UK during the summer riots of 2024 posting on twitter:

> civil war is inevitable

as the owner of a key media platform in the world that sort of statement is indefensible.

He's also picked a side in Germany by weighing in with as much support as possible for AfD.

Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.

I do not know about Germany, but I would characterise Elon's attempts to gain political influence in the UK as failed.

He tried to bribe one party to accept an extremist as a member in return for a huge bribe, and he failed.

He does not seem to have much influence on public opinion.

I do not think its accurate to say he was fighting countries either. He was trying to buy influence. Its not the same thing.

The man owns twitter ffs. The only way his attempts to gain political influence will ever fail is if the UK government block access to twitter or British people decide to stop using it. Until then he has significant capacity to sway political opinion.

As an example: there is significant power in cultivating the default UK experience of twitter for new accounts, which he's already had significant impact on by culling Twitter's internal moderation team. I've experienced it myself and its a an absolute disaster zone of disinformation and bot accounts trying to stoke internal divisions.

You would think so, but he seems to have had remarkably little impact so far.

you're focusing too much on him personally instead of the impact of his platform and how he runs it. Twitter has had significant impact on UK politics and will continue to do so, especially in spreading disinformation[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Leicester_unrest

The platform does spread disinformation, but he does not have much ability to direct it.

Yes, its a different issue from what influence he has personally.

> he does not have much ability to direct it.

This is like saying Steve Jobs didn't have much ability in making Apple devices so small you could fit them between your buttcheeks.

Compared to anyone else in the entire world: Elon Musk has the most agency in cultivating what people see on twitter because he owns it.

That your statement is so far divorced from reality as is possible, makes me think you are not taking this conversation seriously.

>Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.

What are you talking about? Are you making up strawmen?

Im saying he's not worthy of defending. Its clear that he intends to wield his fortune to enact political change.

Pointing out the truth doesn't mean you're defending anyone but the truth. Not everything is partisan.

You're obfuscating the truth. I'm a Brit and clearly more aware than you on how Elon likes to try to interfere with the democratic choices this country has made. In the past day or two, his personal account has been attempting to buoy up Tommy fucking Robinson (for the umpteenth time) who is a violent thug, convicted criminal and renowned Islamophobe. Your "facts" are just sea-lioning misdirection that takes us away from the blatently obvious.

Elon Musk has made his political intentions entirely clear, in writing, on his personal account. Anyone still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt is either being insincere or is a useful idiot.

Again, I wasn't defending him.

Also, shouldn't you be more concerned with little girls in the UK needing to carry knives and axes to defend themselves from migrant rape gangs, than with what Elon is saying?

Especially since he's not causing those issues, he's just reading the room and calling it out as it is.

I feel like you're getting worked up for the wrong things.

> Also, shouldn't you be more concerned with little girls in the UK needing to carry knives and axes to defend themselves from migrant rape gangs

Well thanks for letting me know where you get your information from. I know exactly what your referencing which is a twelve year old feral child and her sister walking around with dangerous weapons, intimidating people and then when anyone stands up to her, they turn the camera on and cry foul. When I was a kid I used to hang out with kids from social, so I've seen it all before. Maybe its new to you, so you fall for it. Perhaps you believe that "clean shirt" is the height of wit?

> Especially since he's not causing those issues, he's just reading the room and calling it out as it is.

Good job in being part of the latest generation to fall for the oldest trick in the book. It's called a hate plank and its a cheap trick used by cheap politicians to manipulate cheap electors. Idk how you stumbled onto here but if it wasn't accidental then you really should know better because you've likely had some level of education, formal or self-taught. CPUs tell us how stupid we are when we give them instructions, have you not learned to distrust your own assumptions yet? How are you convinced that the biggest problems in a given nation are a consequence of the smallest group of people who have been here for the least amount of time?

> I feel like you're getting worked up for the wrong things.

I think getting upset at people playing victim and painting the world as ending in order to obtain political power IS the thing to get worked up about. Personally I love how the slogan MAGA embeds itself in the lie that America isn't great already. Certainly by the size definiton its pretty great and has been for well over a hundred years. GDP per capita is off the fucking charts. Richest country in the world, by a significant margin, greatest stock growth in the world, attracts the most investment, with some of the cheapest goods, some of the best tech and greatest opportunities for its people. But it then convinces itself that *its* the victim. Its absolutely pathetic.

At least feral kids _are_ disadvantaged in the first place which is why they're like that.

Well this was like a huge deal at the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazi...

I know 2024 was like a century ago though so its ok to have already forgotten! It's probably more notable event for Bluesky than Twitter at this point either way. But also either way: there is a clear contrast here with the OP article.

Either you are going out of your way to unban guys, or going out of your way to (effectively) ban them. I think its uncontroversial at the very least to note that he does seem to be making it incredibly hard to argue against the evidence of ideological commitment here, even if there are some 3D chess players out there who can maybe still see a "free speech" forest through the political trees.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1811783320839008381

"""

The European Commission offered an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

X did not.

"""

So the EC are the bad guys masquerading as free speech loving democracy?

And as we all know, Elon is physically unable to lie. Of course there's no actual evidence for this "illegal secret deal".

-- sent from the front seat of my FSD-based unmanned Robotaxi

“Elon” is not fighting something. He is implementing a policy. In countries where the law protects free speech, Twitter/X fights illegal orders that try to coerce them into censorship. That happens to be freer societies. But authoritarian ones that have very clear laws enabling censorship, they follow the local law. That’s not genuflecting but just sticking to a principled approach that avoids them being outright banned in those countries.

I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013.

I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.

They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.

Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.

Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.

After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".

X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).

Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).

Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...

> the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

True. For better, but mostly for worse.

>In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise

Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late.

>Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism.

Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet.

And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen.

And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.

> but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

Yep. In 2013 the social networks all found out that they can sell censorship to governments all over the world and their users wouldn't even notice it.

What is your argument exactly? The world is worse so we should be OK with that?

Exactly that thing Twitter is doing now was one of the main contributors to the world getting worse. That they and all their other competitors have been doing since then.

Free-speech Twitter was either an accident or had a very quick change of mind. And either way, expecting centralized platforms to be of any use here is deeply misguided.

Free speech Twitter was the result of a company that had a single business: moving Tweets to people. Musk and Zuckerberg have many interests globally, and picking fights with governments doesn’t serve those interests. Don’t cheer when a billionaire with global business interests buys a (relatively) independent media property and claims he’s bringing “free speech” because (even if he wasn’t defining the term in a distorted way to benefit his interests) he literally could not do that in a meaningful way, he’s too entangled elsewhere.

Counter argument is free-speech twitter created the world of today with unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other. I am not arguing for censorship, but it is factually wrong that it is censorship that brought us here. The world change before Twitter.

> unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other

No distribution going on the mainstream social networks today is unchecked.

(Except for Watsup, Signal, and the ones like them.)

That is not what happened. The world has changed for the worse and the social networks are the products of their time.

Egg and chicken ?

Anyway, that doesn't matter, what matters is that the people that are still using platforms are effectively collaborating with totalitarian extremists and should be shunned.

> Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

This is ironic on a posting discussing shadow bans.

Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and issues in which he and the firm has personal awareness of and popular capital - for example, see how it stands up to the governments of Brazil and UK.

> (see Twitter Files)

Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)

Personal awareness of, uh-huh

> Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.

I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.

I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views.

It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.

Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.

I got off the bandwagon of old Twitter when they decided to respond to the US electing a Twitter troll President not by enforcing their own policy, but by modifying that policy to create a narrow carve-out of "newsworthiness" for a specific account that could then, more or less, disregard their policies wholesale.

New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.

> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita...

On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face...

Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...

Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor

1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296

Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...

Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025

Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...

YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am...

PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510...

Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...

Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...

Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...

How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo

imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that.

Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.

The idea that a large company has ever "leaned left" in any real sense is a bit ridiculous.

I would argue that Twitter pre-acquisiton had elements of inferiority-complex-driven-correct-isms and tryhard leftism. Not necessarily that I disagree with that biasing especially with what happened to it since. Their intents back then were 120% innocent, just occasionally un-ideal as nothing ever is perfect.

What is left? Your definition might be very different than the majority.

You should be wary in going there, unless you want to be beholden to the opinions of China + India.

Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane.

I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.

It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)

How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?

Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.

Elon has bragged about shadow banning posts in the interview with don lemon. Apparently twitter has been the most important public town square… to manipulate. Thank you.

Which interestingly was almost exclusively far right accounts. He shadow banned 3-4 and kicked a few others off X premium (so they don't get paid for tweets). Which X claimed was for spamming him and others after they disagreed with him over supporting H1B visas. But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

>But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows.

Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos?

None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business.

"If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed."

Ted Turner sold off CNN decades ago. I think it's now owned by whatever became of Time Warner, which is now in the hands of right-wing billionaires with ideologies similar to Bezos and Murdoch.

I know it was a rhetorical question but Phil Knight and his son with Laika studios are the only example of rich guys in media who are actually doing it for the love of the game

Only thing Phil Knights loves more than the game is exploiting child labour in impoverished areas.

Yea, he’s very ruthless about converting impoverished children into stop animation paper model films through an admittedly convoluted process, but at the end of the day he does appear to be making the films for the art itself and not as a money making enterprise as its primary goal

Counterpoint: shadow banning will always be necessary in any public square until mental illness is solved.

The Turkish government definitely has a hand in this situation. Otherwise, I think the fact that I see almost no posts from an account that has notifications enabled and that I follow indicates a flawed algorithm. I congratulate the friend who shared this post. He touched on a very nice, detailed topic...

Possibly but also plausible that they just do it anyway. The post-acquisition Twitter "shadowban" a lot of contents and users in-organically and algorithmically in their attempt to change its content-novelty-meritocracy culture into cash based influence economy, with not significant, but not at all negligible, successes.

They won elections for years with a puppet candidate. Now there is no puppet candidate, and they want to block this one by using all the power of the state.

Are you saying that opposition had a puppet candidate all this time in Turkey, like you'd see in Russian elections?

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.

Not the first time this has happened. It’s very strange. Elon is willing to risk breaking the laws of the EU, Brazil and the UK yet caters to Turkish law with seemingly no resistance whatsoever.

He knows authoritarian countries will order what they want and that’s it, so he simply comply. But for democracies where power is more diffuse, he can afford to make a show and try to shift public opinion to whatever he wants, defying the State as much as possible.

Considering Turkey is an EU membership candidate. This should fall under the guidelines of Digital Services Act. This is a clear violation.

Is it? X just follows the country’s applicable laws right?

Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.

I continue to be skeptical of hanging hopes for 'free speech' on expecting free-as-in-beer, ad-supported, privately owned websites to actively promote the things that you write.

Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor by letting him post on their site in the first place, and in an algorithmic timeline it is impossible to justify how much reach his posts "should" have vs. how much they do have.

If someone wants to post their speech, they should do so on their own website that they pay for and control. They should purchase advertising if they're not satisfied with their traffic. Thwarting those things -- now that's unethical government censorship, which one can justifiably be mad about. Depending on the government in question it may or may not be unconstitutional.

Relying on X or Meta or whomever to distribute your speech just because there's some vague notion of non-interference in speech on such platforms in the countries where they're based is foolish when you live somewhere else with different laws. Even if the US constitution had some draconian provision to force X to promote his speech, that can't really protect him in Turkiye where the government can just block X.

How is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.

- Purchasing advertising can be done from a variety of actors not just a couple social media platforms.

- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.

Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.

It's possible to simultaneously believe that private companies should have control over what messages are shown on their own platform while also believing that exerting such control can be negative to the world.

It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.

I think shadow banning is harmful. But I have been ostracized all my life so I am definitely biased

you will meet assholes in your life, but if everyone you meet is an asshole, you're the asshole

think on this

Or you’re just different in a society that doesn’t tolerate differences.

Even if X is acting under a court order in Turkey, the shadow-ban–like behavior on a global platform is concerning. Hiding posts algorithmically goes beyond legal compliance and raises serious questions about whether X is protecting free speech or quietly facilitating censorship.

AI comment?

It does feel AI, but Ebru Guleç is also a _very_ Turkish name. It could be somebody who doesn’t have the best English is using ai to put together a coherent sentence.

Regardless of the origin, I’d prefer if the comment make an actual claim, instead of just talking about “questions raised”. I wish they’d try to answer the question they detect lol

Long dashes in "shadow-ban–like" is a telltale sign

There is no em-dash in the comment; there is an en-dash used in place of a hyphen where one of the terms joined is itself a hyphenated term.

Edit: Note the parent has since been edited and previously said the tell was an “em-dash”, but now says “long dashes” in reference to a single correct use of the shortest—except in fonts with narrow digits, where the figure dash might be shorter—dash.

Earlier this year: https://xcancel.com/netblocks/status/1902230361968427206

> We don't have solid proof but

These shadowban stories are so often just hearsay and anecdotes from random users just feeding weird conspiracy vibes. Never go on a user saying they don't see something, there's too many variables in the mix from their usage patterns to sure, actual weird Elon/X algorithm tweaks at play.

That Xitter uses a complex, opaque algorithm, is why it should be banned in the first place.

Misleading title. There is no proof at all, just speculation in this post.

From the last paragraph:

"We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds."

Proof has never stopped these people from making claims.

There is proof, people have had their likes and retweets removed from the presidential candidates x account on multiple cases.

Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get.

Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?

I wondered early on if this X brand was going to take off. If maybe this was a genius move that I just didn't comprehend. And yet here we are, over 3 years later, still needing to caveat X with Twitter in common usage.

The problem here is primarily Erdogan and secondarily Musk.

The world might have people like Erdogan hold less powerful positions if large social platforms like Twitter didn't enable populism and suppression so easily.

Okay, half a point.

However, Twitter wasn't instrumental in getting Erdogan elected in 2003.

TV/Radio has been his thing:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-...

Don’t agree with this. People really want to elect these politicians and they significantly represent the culture.

There can be an element of force to how they win but it is not the whole picture.

Have to accept that there are a lot of people with reasons to support these politicians

Poverty and lack of education empower folks like Erdogan.

It’s been long time since Twitter invited to settle in Turkey.. so guessing they getting on well on something obvious lol

Nothing shocking, Musk doesn't stand for free speech, neither does Erdogan.

Actually no president does.

They have to follow the law of the country as tyrannical as it is like they did in Brazil. I hope one day they say fuck it.

Turkey has a law requiring social networks to shadowban opposition-party candidates?

this answers your question: https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081

Not officially but they definitely requested twitter to shadowban the opposition candidate

shadow ban is not part of that

It is when you get a letter from the government telling you to do that on whatever pretext which doesn't matter at that point because you either comply with the government requests, or have to leave the country otherwise they risk banning, fines or imprisonment/asset seizing.

Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it.

The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.

But then X just gets banned in said country

This is acceptable.

Now that country goes from having limited access to having none at all - seems worse.

If you don't like X (understandable) then it's much better to not visit it voluntarily than by a top-down block

It's worse because it hands repressive authorities a much more powerful tool of mind control than what they had before. More powerful because targeted, hard to detect and even harder to prove.

For the world and Turkey, yes, for X, no.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_A...

What other moral standard is there besides laws? Is it that the laws of non-tyrannical countries should override those of tyrannical ones? How do you decide tyrannicalness? Or should internet companies decide what should be allowed in other countries despite those countries and their populations disagreeing? Great firewalls are the solution when nobody can agree with each other across borders but that's a pity.

> What other moral standard is there besides laws?

To be honest, you could restrict your compliance to only the laws of the country you're based in. American companies follow American laws, etc. Then move your company to where you most agree with the laws.

And when your company has an office in that country, or prominent employees have family in that country?

Perhaps do not have an office in that country. As for employees, that is their concern. Ideally the country is not willing to punish the family members of employees of companies that do not follow its draconian laws, but we know some do, such as China. Regardless, that is not a reason to capitulate; if you do so, you are effectively enabling state-backed extortion.

> Or should internet companies decide what should be allowed in other countries despite those countries and their populations disagreeing?

Internet companies (like all companies) can and indeed must choose how they behave. "We follow all laws inside each country" is one such choice, but it's not a special privileged choice that absolves the company of criticism for its behavior.

> What other moral standard is there besides laws?

They took a pretty good stab at it in 1948: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

That's just a snapshot of popular western liberal morals of the time. They also took a pretty good stab at it in the Quran and Hadiths. Both moral standards are still very popular yet they contradict each other. Is Islam wrong or is western liberalism wrong? Should a country with one type of society coerce the other into compliance?

I'm afraid I don't have the answer as to the right balance of belief, force, and consensus it takes for a single society to get along, let alone multiple ones with each other. When I've got that sorted, I'll drop a tweet or something.

;)

The uncorrupted law would be a good start. I'd bet 3:1 that what Erdogan is doing is illegal according to Turkish law as interpreted by a neutral and reasonable judge, but he's doing it anyway. Most countries' laws are much more agreeable than what the government actually does.

Mr freedom of speech strikes again!

I like how Elon is so eager to bend his knee to censor requests from authoritarian "friend" governments like India and Turkey

but when the request comes from a supposedly "left-leaning" judiciary like Brazil to suspend accounts that were posting misinformation, suddenly he stands on his principles and defy the orders.

We all know is vehemently aligned on right wing ideology. So this is not surprising. What in surprised by though is why it’s relevant.

X's stated goal is to comply with the laws of any given country that it operates in. As the article states, there is a court order to restrict that particular users account https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081.

This is a nothing burger.

I suggest you read the article. Officially restricting an account is one thing, but shadow banning without a court order is another. Something suspicious is happening, and the article talks about it.

In my understanding of the article it says they did get a court order: "Elon Musk didn’t say anything about the situation and X didn’t defend freedom of speech. They only said there was a court order and they couldn’t do anything. But many people believe they should have defended free speech."

My reading of the article is that they had a court order telling them to close down the original account, but they seem to be shadow-banning the new account without one.

On a second reading, your interpretation might be the right one, it's not super-clear.

Mine too. But that sounds to me like they're protecting the new account by limiting its reach, not being helpful to the Turkish government. People who seek it out will still see it, but it may pass unseen for a little while from Erdogan who could get a new court order to shut it down with a 30-second phone call.

Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.

The fact that it's their "stated goal" does not exempt them from criticism.

At this point I think we can safely retire “nothing burger”, can’t remember the last time it meant something other than “an inconvenient story for my narrative that I’d rather gloss over”

Elon Musk loves to brand himself as a “free speech absolutist” but when it comes to authoritarian regimes like Turkey, that principle evaporates instantly. Pre-Musk Twitter, for all its flaws, at least pushed back against censorship requests - now, X bends the knee without hesitation.

Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit.

Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.

> Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.

Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape.

"Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.

As they should, the islamic brotherhood are terrorists or soft terrorists funding terrorists. Twitter used o bloack terrorists but then started letting them on to propagate propaganda and literally use the platform to mobilize their troops all over the world, the islamic invasion, as the world sees it today. It has been in the works for decades while we got busy with our own 1st world issues like feminism and homosexuality. Those people will kill these fanatics but uses them to weaken their target.

Hard to believe given the tweets have 100ks of views.

On an earth of 8 billion? And how many views are in Turkey?

That’s it. Im going to get my family to delete their x accounts.

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