It’s not the fact that these systems exist, it’s that Twitter denied that they did for years, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

> Twitter denied that they did for years

You yourself literally posted a link from 4 years ago that demonstrates the opposite of this claim. How is this comment so high? I feel like I'm at a UFO convention and people just want to believe.

> people just want to believe

Accurate. There’s a strong contingent of folks here that believe “the leftists” are oppressing them and “Twitter silences our voices” is a big part of the conspiracy theory.

Musk is throwing fuel on the fire, because he also just wants to believe.

The hilarious part too is that the same contingent also ignores the screenshots showing that the "Libs of Tiktok" account had special rules around moderating it. So much for "silencing conservative thought" (if you can call that Twitter account "thought").

@libsoftiktok is not a left-wing account. The name is derogatory

That's the point. The special rules were "don't moderate this account at all without getting high level approval".

We've had two releases of documentation that prove what you are mockingly-dismissing here, and you pretend that it's still all in people's heads. What am I missing?

They don't prove that. This reasoning is like saying the law oppresses men because they are disproportionately convicted of violent crimes.

Don't read anything into this, but can you see the next step here if you replace "men" with "black men"? Is this actually the point you want to make?

I don't see how that changes anything except to make the analogy politically fraught and easier to derail. The logic remains the same. Certainly, conservatives have no problem with the logic if you modify the analogy as you have suggested.

My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters, in the sense that (in the modified analogy), to say at least some systemic racism doesn't exist in the way the prison stats play out seems naive at best, it seems similarly naive to assume there's no bias in this case as well.

> My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters,

If this is actually your point then you are supporting root's argument, not rebutting it. Root was pointing out poor causal relationships determined from lack of recognition of confounding variables. You just listed another (substantially more famous) example of such a relationship.

Obviously nothing is "just that simple", if that's your only point so be it, but that isn't telling us much since this is true of literally everything.

That was such a bad faith argument/read that I don't even know where to begin.

I would like to see some actual numbers. I am sure they have enough data that could either prove this claim or not.

And I think everyone here is hung up on the literal definition of shadow banning, and not the CONCEPT of monkeying with people's posts without their knowledge or awareness. It's the same thing, and I feel like everyone wants to give them a pass because of pedantry.

Their user agreement says they may limit visibility of tweets. Is their moderation, transparent, no. do they promise that it will be? Also no. I'm fairly sure my own account has some visibility limits on it and has done for ages, but I don't think about it much.

I think it's largely a disagreement on definitions - tweet 7 in the thread even hints at this:

>>>7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

My definition of "shadow banning" (or hellbanning) is that the user's tweets/posts are not visible to anyone except them; Twitter was not doing that. Twitter was clear in saying "oh, we limit visibility, don't allow certain things in trending topics, etc." and apparently some people think of that as shadow banning.

> Abusive and spammy behavior. When abuse or manipulation of our service is reported or detected, we may take action to limit the reach of a person's Tweets. Learn more about actions we take, including temporary and permanent account suspensions, and limiting account functionality.

https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/160101566099344998...

By all means, everyone, feel free to be pendatic about the language here, and deferring to their weasels words, in the direct light of the documentation that has been released, because you agree with the editorial direction. It has been SPECIFICALLY revealed that they frobbed the knobs when they didn’t like what was being posted, while admitting that their own policies weren’t being triggered, and they had no justification.

> It has been SPECIFICALLY revealed that they frobbed the knobs when they didn’t like what was being posted, while admitting that their own policies weren’t being triggered

Where was this revealed? I saw Bari Weiss claim it happened but the screenshot she posted as evidence specifically says the account violated their policies.

It's literally in the same thread!

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601020845224128512

I guess you're reading this and saying that "indirect" violations are the same thing as direct, i.e., defined, violations? Is that what's happening? People downvoting me are being absolute pedants about the definition of "shadow banning," and then just give this part a pass and say it's fine?

I guess this is the world we live in now, in every respect. There's so much STUFF going on, and so much written about the stuff, that people can choose to focus on whichever half they want, and find plenty to support their position. But I still live in a world where the general IDEA is the main thing, and Twitter has been shown to do things outside of their stated policy. And, sure, as someone else pointed out, they're allowed to do whatever they want. But they didn't have to hedge and lie about it.

they literally had a press conference about most of these features in 2018

> Twitter denied that they did for years

twitter has denied what for years? if you're implying they denied they moderate, delete, or derank content, this is absolutely not true.

> it’s that Twitter denied that they did for years

When ? I haven't seen any evidence of this.

First hit on google: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

That's not shadow-banning

They fucked up and admitted it (what algo is infallible?)

The fuckup wasn't targeted, it was algorithmic, and it affected both sides of the isle.

Your link literally demonstrates the opposite of your claim.

Unless I’ve missed something there’s still no evidence of Twitter shadow banning users. Weiss incorrectly calls a bunch of things “shadow banning” but not anything the matches the actual accepted definition.

Limiting reach is not the same as shadow banning which has a specific meaning.

"Limiting reach" is what Twitter users think shadowbanning is. I've seen major accounts declare that, because less people are retweeting them than they think is normal, they must be shadowbanned. Obviously, if they were actually shadowbanned, nobody would be retweeting them.

That's not a good definition. If I have 0 followers I have very limited reach. You need a consistent definition. No one thinks downweighting content is shadowbanning either (unless that weight is 0, but then we're back to the normal definition).

This seems to say what they did wasn't how Twitter defines shadow banning.

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1601019554980761600?s...

Reminds me how certain governments redefined mass surveillance then denied it.

Is it really redefined though? iirc it's how Reddit also implements shadow bans, no one else can see your messages other than you, to you it looks normal.

And the systems were overwhelmingly used to throttle one type of political viewpoint.

Indeed and here is their tweet saying they do not

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1022658436704731136?s=46&...

Isn't there a fiduciary duty to be honest with their investors?

Fiduciary duty is a responsibility to act in someone's best interests (the investors in this case)[1]. The requirement to not make misleading statements affecting investors is a different requirement [2].

To the substance of your statement, they don't shadow ban, so that's not a misleading statement. The fact that a lot of people take an extremely broad view of what shadow banning is doesn't change that. Twitter actually define shadow banning in the link in the tweet you posted, and explain what they do and why that's not shadow banning.[3]

[1] Very good explanation here https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-are-som...

[2] Not to "misrepresent" material facts, which is a form of securities fraud https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/misrepresentation.asp

[3] The original link is down but I found it in the internet archive. https://archive.vn/m4bT4

Musk went through with the deal because he couldn't prove Twitter lied to investors, so I see no reason to trust him now.

It's generally assumed investors can read. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

> without proposing or creating an alternative

They have an alternative in mind. It's called unfettered free speech.

Problem for Twitter is that advertisers aren't interested in a fancier 4chan.

If Twitter content will become similar to 4chan content, the advertisers will behave with Twitter as with 4chan.

> Why is anyone surprised that the major/globally operating social media companies have extensive internal systems for controlling the content that appears via their platforms?

No one is. These Twitter Files are just building on a right wing prior of them being shadow banned. But they have yet to demonstrate that right wingers are specifically targeted. They don't show why these accounts got flagged (the crux of the issue and none of this means anything without demonstrating this knowledge) but just show prominent right wingers that did get flagged. We just get left with more questions. Do prominent left wingers also get flagged? Do prominent left wingers act in ways that would similarly be flagged? Is flagging biased? (I'm sure it is, but lets' measure it)

It is a common statistical manipulation through leading someone to causal conclusions via selection bias (sometimes called "malinformation"). While not directly said these tweets (and the previous ones) are targeted to make the reader believe that Twitter silences right wing voices. This may very well be true, but they have yet to provide strong evidence of this. Just samples. Problem is, we don't know anything about the distribution of samples so we have no means of determining if they are cherry-picked or not.

This is exactly right.

If this[0] is accurate, then 99.7% of political contributions made by Twitter employees went to Democrats in 2022.

Is it unreasonable to suspect people on the right are targeted more often than the people on the left? Wouldn't that be the default assumption and the opposite position would need evidence to prove otherwise?

[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656?s=20&...

> If this[0] is accurate, then 99.7% of political contributions made by Twitter employees went to Democrats in 2022.

You're jumping a step here because you're making a sampling error. Like I said before, we know nothing about the distribution.

Let's put this in an extreme example. Suppose there are 100 people. 99 of them have the favorite color green. 1 of them has the favorite color red. Does that mean the logo will be red? What assumptions are implicit here to say yes? (this is where the logic fails) If a singular person controls the color of the logo and that person is not chosen at random then it really doesn't matter how many people have a favorite color green. The logo will be the favorite color of the person that makes the choice. Everyone else is noise.

Coming back to Twitter it would be naive to assume that the choices are being made democratically or uniformly at random. So what does the median employee's opinion matter? We know that higher incomes tend to lean more conservative but this is hard to say here because those studies generally aggregate out all salaries >$100k/yr, which might as well be a random sample. If the trend continues (reasonable assumption, but naive to take as fact) then it is reasonable to assume that managers (who we are assuming make more money than the median employee) are more conservative. But again, we just don't know.

The data you are linking to is actually irrelevant to the conversation at hand (it also has a huge yearly variance, making it even more noisy).

Yes, it is unreasonable. This is not how companies work. The personal preferences of employees are not what govern the operations of their employer.

Sure would be easier if the world was that black and white but unfortunately there are a lot of gray areas employees encounter which are left up to their subjective judgement.

Tesla employees gave 93% to Democrats; do you think the cars work better if the owner is a Democrat?

Employees of Trump Entertainment Resorts gave 100% to Democrats!

It isn't an unreasonable leap for people in our position with very limited information, but it is still just a guess. It's a shame that both of these reporters, with eyes inside the machine, seem to want to HINT that there is systemic bias without providing any supporting evidence.

> It isn't an unreasonable leap for people in our position with very limited information

No, this is exactly WHY it is unreasonable. This is how conspiracy theories work. Humans want causal understandings but they have limited information and their imaginations fill in the gaps. If you have little information you should also have low confidence. Look around here at how many people are certain of conspiracy. Look in the Twitter thread too. Much of what people are saying is highly unreasonable and this is not healthy for us as a community.

That tweet is as good as worthless imo. For all we know the entire $167k was from a single executive who had no moderation power.

No, the vast majority of mass killings in the US are by right wing extremists, resulting from the vast number of calls for violence from right wing leaders and social media posters. Misinformation and mass delusion like QAnon is way more prevalent on the right. And so is denial of reality like Alex Jones' attacks on Sandy Hook parents. Where are the equivalent of QAnon and Alex Jones on right?

What is your source for this? As far as I understand the vast majority of mass killings in the US have no political motive.

Source? Most mass shootings were related to gang violence last I checked.

The vast majority of mass killings are not politically motivated and are in fact gang related. The vast majority of politically related mass killings are committed by people with severe mental illness and the political leanings of the perpetrators are irrelevant. Of the politically related mass killings done by people of sound mind, the distribution is fairly even politically speaking.

They surreptitiously colluded with congressmen and FBI spooks to suppress political speech before an election. I think you’re missing the bigger story here.

The current releases haven't established anything even close to that. Can you cite which tweet(s) you are referring to? Honestly, if they do have evidence of something in that ballpark, these two have done a terrible job exposing it.

source?

Ok, let's say they did, it's a private company, 1st Amendment doesn't apply in the manner you seem to think. In fact it's the opposite, they as an entity / company have 1st Amendment rights to do as they please with content on their platform.

That being said, yes they suppressed propaganda and disinformation that could lead to bodily harm (as on J6). People like Fox News hosts pushing disinformation that could lead to people dying over COVID is easily crossover into legal territory. Why would they want that shit on their platform? Is it their fault all the disinformation comes from right wing kooks?

This argument is ridiculous. It's like Nazis complaining their propaganda was being removed from the radio and their voice was being silenced.

> It's a private company

Twitter benefits from network effects, which makes them immune to an extent from the normal rules of private-sector competition. Telephone carriers have to carry certain speech, your power company can't shut off your power because they don't like your speech, etc… Arguably the major social media platforms are in a similar position.

Twitter also colludes with government officials, as revealed in the previous "Twitter files" installment.

> they suppressed propaganda

I just checked the Twitter Rules [1], the Rules don't forbid "propaganda".

And I just checked the definition of "propaganda" [2], seems like it includes many things that nobody alleges is against the Rules (for example, any political ad, no matter what it advocates, is "propaganda").

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

What the congressmen did was illegal on their part. What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election which the fake left seemed to be so upset about. The tweets weren’t propaganda, some of them were about Joe Biden being involved in illegal deals with eg China. The source information for this, his sons laptop, has been verified as authentic by for example the Washington Post.

There is no way to bend far enough to excuse what happened here.

> What Twitter did was at best unethical, but ironically, severely tampering with our election…

Huh? Twitter does not administer US elections last I checked. I am sure people could read this hugely consequential information you're claiming on Reddit, 4chan, OANN, AM radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, or various other outlets that right-leaning voters typically seem to use. In fact, I seem to recall all of those running several stories about it at the time.

Or are you claiming that Twitter is the sole source of media that the entire United States consumes?

If the story circulating on all the major social media platforms didn't make a difference they wouldn't have suppressed it.

I'm not sure where to even start with this clearly agitated post. If you genuinely think all disinformation comes from "right wing kooks" you might be in an information bubble.

I would have thought at least the Hunter Biden laptop story pierced that bubble for most people recently by demonstrating these "right wing kooks' were the only ones NOT spreading misinformation.

I think it’s because they said repeatedly they were doing no such thing.

You really think someone would do that? Just form a corporation and tell lies?