Twitter pulls back the curtain II
For years, it’s been assumed by many that Twitter engages in what’s known as ‘shadow banning’, a catch-all term to describe Twitter interfering with what can be seen on the platform. In 2018, Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said that they don't shadow ban and certainly didn’t due to political differences. Beykpour still claims that. However, is this true or just semantics? If you can define the language, the terminology then you can claim to not be doing something even if you are. Twitter’s term was ‘visibility filtering’.
During the past week, Bari Weiss published on Twitter a litany of information that shows that, whatever the claims and semantics used by former Twitter leadership, Twitter was clearly engaged in shadow banning. Photos make it absolutely clear as Twitter’s interface has tags for each account that show anything that’s been done to ‘handle’ each account.
Source: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601013855697588224
This is a particularly egregious example. Dr Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor at Stanford whose core competence is infectious diseases. He argued that lockdowns as a response to covid would harm children. In response, Twitter shadow banned him so that his tweets couldn’t trend on the platform. This wasn't a culture war topic, it was the curtailment of the voice of a specialist at exactly the time we needed to hear his voice. Whether right or wrong, this was his moment, and Twitter muzzled him.
And this is just one tool for curtailing speech on Twitter. Weiss also provided evidence of the following tools:
Search blacklist
NSFW View
Do not amplify
The point is not that such tools shouldn't exist as there are real reasons to be shadow ban content such as Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) material. The point is that once such tools exist they can be exploited and abused, just as they were in the case of Dr Jay Bhattacharya. But a future update should at least make this visible to all users.
The key conclusion from all of this is that, at long last, we can see the extent to which Twitter has had its finger on the scales. And a telling indication of that is the nature of the response from legacy media. The same phrases were used by them again and again: ‘nothingburger’ and ‘running pr for the world’s richest man’.
Now, following the publication by Weiss, the legacy media claim, once ‘that’s a conspiracy theory’ has shifted to ‘duh, we all knew that, it’s not news’. But their attempt to signal that there’s nothing to see here itself becomes a signal that there is something to see here. Perhaps where legacy media runs with these stock phrases we should be paying more attention.
And for those of us outside the USA the question becomes how big a finger has Twitter put on the scales of conversations that have been taking place outside the USA? How has Twitter, a foreign platform, been interfering in our political, cultural and social conversations?