A Combustible Lemon wrote:What would proof even look like? it'd have to be proof of there being a tweet and the tweet not showing up on your personal timeline. (which is unarchivable)
Even if it were archivable you'd need it to happen consistently to the same person to rule out the idea of it not being a timing thing unique to that day.
It's been happening to people I follow for a long while and I've witnessed it personally. Max said it happened to him. Twitter admits it happens. Honestly "twitter admits it happens, it just doesn't call them shadowbans" should be enough proof since it's literally just a semantics argument on their end and you can take their statement entirely in good faith and still end up with "quality-based content filtering happens" and "It's targeted several prominent republicans in office".
Yes, Max did say this happened to him...which is odd if we're still assuming that anti-conservative bias is the problem here, since he's center-left IIRC and also said he doesn't really discuss politics on Twitter to begin with. That makes this sound more like some kind of random fuckup than a partisan one. Without something resembling an actual dataset to work with, as opposed to a couple of anecdotes, it's really hard to spot systemic bias against a group precisely because individual factors are so hard to tease out in individual cases.
I realize that incontrovertible proof is unrealistic here, but for our purposes I'm fine with "proof" of the sort that VICE supplied: a systematic survey of a reasonably large and ideologically/temperamentally diverse group of Twitter accounts (by temperamentally diverse, I mean no fair only looking at Democratic milquetoasts and Republican firebrands), which finds a disparate impact too large to be realistically attributed to chance. If such evidence was provided to Twitter months or years ago and they ignored it, that'd be compelling evidence that they were at very least inexcusably slow to respond to the problem, and I'd understand taking it as evidence of apathy or bad intent.
I already agree with the core premise that Twitter suppresses legitimate conservative speech in certain ways, and that this is most likely a consequence of institutional political bias at the company, whether conscious or unconscious. So if that's all you're after then there's no need for this. On the other hand, if you want me to accept that they were doing this
intentionally out of spite against conservatives, or
intentionally ignoring the problem out of indifference, I need more evidence before I'm ready to buy that.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn