Snark aside (and seriously, Lemon, no need to be so sour) shadowbanning is a real practice that social networks like Facebook and Twitter have been denying for years, and this blog from Twitter's support staff admits to doing every action that fits the definition of shadowbanning, while trying to say they "technically" don't do it.
When an outlet as far to the left as
VICE says so, it's time to admit there must be something to it:
The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and it's the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility...
“I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that, based on the facts that I'm neither prominent nor a racist, yet my account has been shadowbanned in the past (not currently, last I checked), even though I never engage on shit posting and barely even tweet about politics.
“This isn’t evidence of a pattern of anti-conservative bias since some Republicans still appear and some don’t. This just appears to be a cluster of conservatives who have been affected,” said New York Law School Professor Ari Ezra Waldman.
So how do you explain this?
Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review.
Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.
Well, that's convenient, especially after people like Maxine Waters have talked about harassing federal employees on the street.
"The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American"
I think it should also concern the stock owners, as both Facebook and Twitter are bleeding both users and billions of dollars every day.
Algorithms or not; intentional or not; the fact is they're dropping the ball, people have noticed this, and they're not happy about it.