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Twitter Censorship: “Shadow Banning” Is Written Into the Platform’s New Terms

December 5, 2019

TWITTER CENSORSHIP: “SHADOW BANNING” IS WRITTEN INTO THE PLATFORM’S NEW TERMS

Twitter has written “shadow banning” aka, censorship, into their new terms.  The platform will now intentionally “limit the visibility” of some users. Expect those who dissent from the official narrative to be the ones censored.

Critics have accused Twitter of censorship for quite some time now.  But this time, it’s official. The company has admitted they will attempt to silence those critical of the ruling class. According to RT, the news terms will be taking effect in January of 2020. While the new terms don’t look like much to write home about, some tweaks to the language could have larger repercussions for users, limiting their reach behind the scenes without their knowledge.

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Last year, when I spoke to Twitter reps, they lied and gaslight us about their targeted manipulation of people’s tweets. Now it’s in their new TOS. https://www.xbiz.com/news/248768/twitters-new-terms-of-service-effective-january-reserves-right-to-shadowban … nu, @RubinReport, we’re waiting for an alternative

“We may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you,” the new terms state.

The social media giant is telling users that it reserves the right shadow ban or “throttle” or censor certain accounts. And it is not clear on what basis will it make those decisions, although we guess (based on their past which is rife with censorship) that accounts that aren’t parroting the government’s official narrative will be on the list.

CENSORSHIP INCREASES: Twitter Suspend More Conservatives

While Twitter has previously insisted point-blank “we do not shadow ban,” in the pre-2020 terms the company split hairs between shadow banning and “ranking” posts to determine their prominence on the site, and acknowledged deliberately down-ranking “bad-faith actors” to limit their visibility.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now

October 27, 2018

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now

Just about the only bulwark against being silenced by the modern-day tech-corporate-NKVD-Stasi is Patreon.

If you do a search of shadow banning, you’ll find sites that claim to help you identify whether Twitter or Instagram has shadow banned your account. The basic idea of shadow banning is to spoof the shadow-banned user into believing their public posts are visible to all while in reality the posts are visible only to the user or in some cases to the users’ followers.

Wikipedia’s definition of shadow banning is:

“Shadow banning (also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting) is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.”

Here is whatis.com’s description: “Shadow banning is controversial because it allows an administrator or moderator to effectively become a censor and prevent specific users from interacting with other members of an online community on an equal basis.”

Shadow banning and outright banning are only the tip of the iceberg: everyone who posts content on the web or social media is subject to much more subtle and completely opaque controls on how much of your digital presence has been ghosted–not just in social media communities but in searches and how links to your site/content and re-posts of your content are handled by the tech cartel that controls what’s visible and “found” on the web and social media.

This cartel is dominated by Google and Facebook. Google controls over 90% of all search: what search results are displayed, the weight given to links (the page-rank assigned to websites) and a variety of other factors that can be depreciated, removed, omitted or blocked by algorithms and/or human censors (a.k.a. administrators) without recourse and without the site or user being informed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Project Veritas Exposes Twitter “Shadow Banning”, Blocking Opposing Views

January 11, 2018

Project Veritas Exposes Twitter “Shadow Banning”, Blocking Opposing Views

In the latest of a series of undercover operations targeting the mainstream media and now Social Media, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas has just dropped a new undercover video which reveals Twitter “shadow banning” and creating algorithms that censor certain ideas.

The first clip features a former Twitter software engineer who explains how/why Twitter “shadow bans” certain users:

Abhinav Vadrevu:  “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content.”

“So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.”

Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

In the full video (see below) Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Nora explains that Twitter doesn’t have an official written policy that targets conservative speech, but rather they were following “unwritten rules from the top”:

“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.”

“There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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