Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake news

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Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake news

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:30 am

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us ... nning.html

The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.


You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile)


Anyway, Dromfph can't keep getting away with this.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Marcuse » Fri Jul 27, 2018 1:32 pm

So, is the title supposed to be sarcastic, or serious? I don't use twitter at all so I don't know.

What's the proof that people have been shadowbanned? Is it just people complaining on twitter they can't find someone? Has there been anything conclusively showing this is deliberate and not either a fuckup or a misapprehension?

I'm confusd.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Jul 28, 2018 10:05 am

Shadowbanning is a tool used to make spambots less effective, because they would recognize regular bans and create new accounts. A shadowbanned spambot can't see that it's been shadowbanned.
When you use this tool on a real person, you're creating a situation where they think they have less support than they do because no one's looking at their posts. And it's a perversion of the original intent.

So at any given point, if someone complains about a shadowban, they're not talking about literally no one being able to see their posts. They're talking about their posts being taken out of the public feed and hidden down in a dark cellar down a ladder in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
And at any given point, they're not talking about letting spambots run free.

So when Twitter admits it gives people visibility scores based on their interactions. (including blocks, which liberals fucking automate with a ridiculous blockbot that is literally just based on following a threshold percentage of seed conservative accounts)
And admits that accounts can be put into a state where the only way to find their tweets is to actually go look on their own timeline.
And prominently uses "Tweets from bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or divide the conversation should be ranked lower" as a criterion in a world where liberal twitter considers every single person right of Stalin ever a bad-faith actor.

It's pretty obviously lying about what it's doing in an attempt to get dumbasses with TDS to defend it from criticism because Orange Man said the word shadowbanning.

I'm not sure why you're asking for any proof when twitter's admitting to shadowbanning accounts right there. They shadowban people.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Tesseracts » Sat Jul 28, 2018 2:58 pm

I've never heard of this controversy so the first post is indeed confusing. I also have no idea what this has to do with Trump. I don't support shadowbanning but I understand why they want to eliminate trolls.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:53 pm

"Dumbasses with TDS"

Oh dear, my ears are burning.

Though, I'm with Tess here, I'm not getting the Trump connection, nor has this been on my radar. Is there a real hard reason to believe this is ideologically motivated? Twitter, as a platform, gets a lot of flak from all sides for some decidedly shit practices, but trolls are trolls, regardless of what political stripe.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Sat Jul 28, 2018 7:59 pm

Twitter doing Something about bots and trolls. Sinister Anti-Trump conspiracy. Hmm.
Image

Hmm.
Image
Hmm.
Image

Yeah, I don't really see it. Good attempt, though.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Sat Jul 28, 2018 8:52 pm

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:Twitter doing Something about bots and trolls. Sinister Anti-Trump conspiracy. Hmm.
Yeah, I don't really see it. Good attempt, though.


A bunch of images and snark isn't constructive dialogue. Please keep things civil.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 10:42 pm

A Combustible Lemon wrote:Shadowbanning is a tool used to make spambots less effective, because they would recognize regular bans and create new accounts. A shadowbanned spambot can't see that it's been shadowbanned.
When you use this tool on a real person, you're creating a situation where they think they have less support than they do because no one's looking at their posts. And it's a perversion of the original intent.


On a forum site I used to be on the staff of, the admins occasionally "shadowbanned" particularly persistent trolls--the kind who'd just get a new IP and make a new account every time you ban one, over and over, making them a major pain to get rid of otherwise. Shadowbanning gives a troll the impression that people are wise to their game and they're being ignored, which is of course the best way to get rid of a troll. One or two figured it out, but most just left.

You draw a distinction here between spambots and "real people", but I'm not sure why. Spambots are merely instruments of real people, and if a real person carpets a social media site with advertisements for their miracle penis enlargement pills I don't see why they should be treated any differently than a spambot doing the same thing. Ditto for real people who, for example, make an account to bombard a discussion site with child porn images or go into an advice forum and tell rape victims that they're ugly sluts who deserved it, then proceed to make new accounts and do the exact same things again and again upon being banned.

In short, what is the practical difference between a persistent human spammer and a spambot they create to do that job for them, which makes it acceptable to "shadowban" the latter but impermissible to do the same to the former?
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby NathanLoiselle » Sun Jul 29, 2018 12:38 am

This may have been said but I'm not reading through, ooh look pictures!, all your text.

Twitter themselves said in some article that I can't source because I forget where I read it that they didn't shadowban anyone in regard to this. There was an algorithm change and it stopped listing assholes in it's auto-suggest. And if you're using auto-suggest instead of bookmarking your favorite assholes then you're too lazy to live! Mom!
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby 52xMax » Sun Jul 29, 2018 9:22 pm

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.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Crimson847 » Mon Jul 30, 2018 12:18 am

The fact is they dropped the ball. Past tense. As your article notes, Twitter appears to have fixed the problem within hours of it being reported, before Trump even tweeted about it.

UPDATE: July 26, 10:00 AM: Twitter appears to have adjusted its platform overnight to no longer limit the visibility of some prominent Republicans in its search results.


But people still aren't happy despite the rapid resolution of the problem, because most of the hullabaloo isn't actually about whether shadowbanning is acceptable or this specific flaw in Twitter's algorithm. Rather, this is an opening for folks on the right to vent their spleen about decades worth of offenses that the liberal media has offered them, and for folks on the left to make fun of them for it like they always do. That's why it doesn't matter if this particular problem was already solved, any more than it matters whether the gun control laws favored by Democrats would actually have stopped the latest mass shooting making the rounds in the media. The specific incident is largely a pretext for continuing a much bigger fight that's been brewing for half a century.

Which, of course, puts third parties like Twitter in an interesting position when they make what may well have been a good-faith programming error, fix it almost immediately, and get all that pent-up rage delivered to their doorstep as a reward.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby iMURDAu » Mon Jul 30, 2018 2:11 pm

52xMax wrote: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.


Step your game up Skynet.

Actually, that was sarcasm. I don't want that.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby 52xMax » Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:34 am

They fixed (part of) a problem that's been going on for months, that they're responsible for in the first place, and that they knew what's going on and denied for a long time because it was only affecting people on the "wrong" side of the political spectrum, as soon as one of their own calls them on it.

Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Learned Nand » Tue Jul 31, 2018 7:42 am

Is there any evidence that this practice either inherently disfavored a political viewpoint, or disproportionately affected Twitter accounts with a particular political viewpoint?
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Re: Twitter Shadowbanning proved to conclusively be fake new

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Jul 31, 2018 8:03 am

52xMax wrote:They fixed (part of) a problem that's been going on for months that they're responsible for in the first place, and that they knew what's going on and denied for a long time because it was only affecting people on the "wrong" side of the political spectrum, as soon as one of their own calls them on it.


This isn't supported by the evidence you've provided so far. You've demonstrated that Twitter "shadowbanned" some prominent Republicans like Ronna McDaniel, that Vice reported it, and that Twitter fixed the problem. Unless I'm missing something, though, you haven't demonstrated these additional claims that the problem is actually still mostly unresolved, that Twitter understood what was happening for months and ignored the problem, or any of that. You holdin' out on me, bro?

And to be clear, I'm not arguing that there's "nothing to see here", any more than I'm implying that there's nothing to see here when children get shot. I'm saying that this is a fight over much bigger things than Twitter's shadowbanning algorithms, not that it's a fight over nothing.
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