Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake news

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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Fri Aug 03, 2018 4:18 pm

Spambots are fire and forget. Real People aren't. Spambots can make hundreds to thousands of posts a second if the posts weren't gated by a timer, real people can't get even close to that efficient. Multiple Spambots can run at the same time on a single computer, real people have attention spans.

Shadowbanning a spambot is allowed because there's no other solution to the problem, it's an arms race with the people developing them.

Shadowbanning a person who's consistently bad would make sense /after you've banned them and they came back/.
In most places, dodging your ban is banworthy by itself. It's an open-and-shut case.

Are you sure you can't see the difference between these two and an automated behavioral ban that can be shown to be blatantly biased politically?

Shadowbanning people before they've done anything wrong isn't justifiable in any way. It's quite literally thoughtcrime.

Besides, you said automating it isn't an excuse on the poster side, how is it an excuse on the moderator side? The shadowbans have been observable for easily three years now, and it took a friggin congressman talking about it to get it fixed.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Aug 03, 2018 6:54 pm

A Combustible Lemon wrote:Spambots are fire and forget. Real People aren't. Spambots can make hundreds to thousands of posts a second if the posts weren't gated by a timer, real people can't get even close to that efficient. Multiple Spambots can run at the same time on a single computer, real people have attention spans.

Shadowbanning a spambot is allowed because there's no other solution to the problem, it's an arms race with the people developing them.

Shadowbanning a person who's consistently bad would make sense /after you've banned them and they came back/.
In most places, dodging your ban is banworthy by itself. It's an open-and-shut case.


Jolly good then.

Are you sure you can't see the difference between these two and an automated behavioral ban that can be shown to be blatantly biased politically?


I'm not a fan of any moderating process that can be shown to be blatantly biased politically, automated or not. My objection was simply that you seemed to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Besides, you said automating it isn't an excuse on the poster side, how is it an excuse on the moderator side?


I give people who write software a fair amount of leeway for mistakes because of the immense complexity of writing software. Particularly this kind of software that has to try to understand and react to human activity, something computers still aren't great at yet.

Spambots are made to spam; that's their intended purpose. There's no mistake there. By contrast, if another type of software somehow started producing spam accidentally as the result of some kind of oversight or bug, I'd be substantially more forgiving of its author; likewise, if it were evident to me that Twitter was deliberately trying to make it more difficult for conservatives to use their site, I'd be substantially less forgiving of that.

The shadowbans have been observable for easily three years now, and it took a friggin congressman talking about it to get it fixed.


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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Fri Aug 03, 2018 7:21 pm

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".
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Learned Nand » Fri Aug 03, 2018 10:57 pm

Nobody here is arguing that Twitter doesn't shadowban certain accounts. But you and Max have additionally asserted that a) this has been going on for years and b) is politically biased. If you're now saying that those claims are unproven (perhaps because they are unprovable), then I guess we're in agreement.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Aug 04, 2018 4:58 am

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.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby 52xMax » Sun Aug 05, 2018 2:02 am

I wasn't going to further reply to this thread since I thought Twitter's own admission should've been proof enough, but given that people are questioning it I will address it.

Yes, I've been shadowbanned in the past, multiple times. People who follow me, including irl friends, have notified me that some of my tweets don't show up on their timelines, and I have noticed myself when some of the more controversial users I follow don't seem to show up until I go to their profiles, though they appear on personal lists as well as third party apps like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

I can attest to at least a couple of times it's happened to me this year alone, and though I try to steer clear from political content and over 90% of what I post and share is apolitical or neutral, the times when I do engage in certain campaigns or hashtags, either my own opinions or retweets, it just so happens that's when my presence starts to blink. The last time I was made aware of this was around the arrest of Tommy Robinson, and the previous time before that was when Marcus Meechum, aka Count Dankula was sentenced for the "nazi pug trial". I don't consider any of these cases as "right wing" issues, and I always support free speech causes, but I never have this problem when it comes to speaking up about very similar cases on the "left", such as the James Gunn debacle from last month.

So yeah, Twitter does have a bias, and they have no problem sending users to the shadow realm.
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