"Orwellian" can mean other things when describing state power or surveillance technology, but in this context it is being used to describe language so the connection to Newspeak is the relevant one.
What Twitter did was not shadowbanning - other people could see the posts.
Pretending it is shadowbanning is bad faith arguing of the worst kind.
Except that's not how most people understand the term. Terminology is defined by its usage, so if you're in the minority of how this term is used, you've lost. We already had this debate about hacker/cracker over 20 years ago. Hacker is still here, so get used to the broader meaning of shadowbanning.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+shadowban&oq=defin...
verb: shadowban - block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
The way Twitter defines shadowban is more narrow than that.
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden. Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
Language is about effective communication. Right now we're all trying to have an important conversation about relevant social issues which requires a common understanding. You cited the common understanding, I pointed out how Twitter engaged in practices covered by that common understanding, and that should be the end of that. Can we move on now?
Instead of bikeshedding over this irrelevant minutae, engage with the actual substance of the discussions, like whether there should be limits to moderation policies for online public squares, what the guidelines for censoring speech should look like, whether to deplatform people entirely or merely deprioritize their speech, etc.
They don't prevent people seeing tweets of anyone. If you follow soneone you see their tweets, if you dont follow them but gonto their profile you see their tweets.
Tweets are universally publically viewable. The policies they use are not secret.
Trying to start a conversation about their secret shadowbanning policy is a dead end as the policy is not shadow banning and it is not secret.
That is shadowbanning by your own definition, and each ban was not disclosed and thus done in secret, because that's what it means to be shadowbanned.
There is a perfectly obvious interpretation of the language being used to describe this situation, and all you're doing is adding noise because people aren't using terms in the way you want while ignoring the substance. That's textbook bad faith arguing, which ironically is what you were accusing the original poster of doing.
This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers. The only thing twitter is not doing is having their algorithm highlight them to people who weren’t following them or participating in a conversation with them. That doesn’t fit any common definition of shadow-banning.
No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this: if you use Twitter's search to try to find a delisted user on Twitter, you can't find them. Sometimes you can't even @ them. This fits the general definition of shadowbanning that the other poster provided, wherein their content cannot be found using Twitter, thereby that qualifies as being shadowbanned on Twitter.
The fact that you can sometimes find that content via other means is totally irrelevant.
Your frustration stems from angrily telling people something is wrong based on your misunderstanding of a term. You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
It's not my redefinition, it's literally the definition the other poster provided which they discovered via Google, and the application of that definition matches how thousands of tech and laypeople are using it in this conversation, and how the media is covering it. But, you do you.
Finally, I'm not sure where your ability to surmise my emotional state based only on text comes from, but I think it needs some tuning.
Per [1]:
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past [...]
Sure, innocuous sounding words like "rendition" would never be reappropriated as code for something more sinister, right?
Seems to me that innocuous sounding jargon actually makes Orwellian doublethink much easier to swallow. Like a frog in a slowly heated pot of water, you get exposed to and acclimatize to progressively more problematic uses of power until you simultaneously believe that you are a patriot upholding citizen's rights while routinely violating them.
I'm not really sure why you think this process can't happen in a private company.
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...