What Is Shadow Banning on Twitter?
Last week, the president, citing a poorly crafted VICE News article , accused Twitter of “shady banning from prominent Republicans.” Twitter hasn’t banned anyone. But they hid the reports of some Republican politicians, not because they were Republicans, but for two more unpleasant reasons.
The president is wrong (!) – Twitter deliberately does not hide accounts based on political affiliation. But in fact, something strange was happening with some accounts, including some Republican figures. And if it affects a lot of Republican users, as Twitter hinted in a blog post, it’s because these users are associated with abuse schemes .
What is this shadow ban?
The shadow ban used on sites like Reddit and Craigslist is a form of ban that is not immediately obvious to the user. The user can continue to post messages, but his messages are not visible to anyone but himself.
A shadow ban gives the moderators a little time: if the user doesn’t immediately notice that no one is responding to his messages, he can spend more time on harmless posts in the void, instead of creating a new account and posting inappropriate content. … Thus, a shadow ban is a tool against abuse and spam.
Twitter banned by shady?
In a blog post about the alleged shadow ban, Twitter says no:
We do not use a shadow ban. You can always see tweets from the accounts you follow (although you might have to work hard to find them, such as going directly to their profile). And we are certainly not a shadow ban based on political views or ideology.
We can say that Twitter is unreliable, but there is no reason to believe it. The site has the ability to block obvious Nazi accounts , but it permanently blocks those accounts only in countries where it is enforced by law.
The company bends back to appease the right wing, to the point that some might call it cowardly or collaborative. It would be uncharacteristic and even less strategic than usual for a shadow ban service to incumbent members of Congress. This is a company that has chosen not to ban the president for open threats of violence that clearly violate Twitter’s terms of service.
But what has Twitter done ?
Twitter really makes it easier to find some accounts than others. According to the company, their search results prioritize popular tweets and discourage “tweets from unscrupulous individuals who intend to manipulate or share the conversation.” This is a rather succinct description, so Twitter reveals some factors that help identify “bad actors”:
- How old is the account and whether the user completed their profile
- Who the account is subscribed to and who is retweeting
- Who muted, blocked, subscribed to an account and retweeted it
The specifics are still a mystery, in part because if Twitter explained every detail of the algorithm, it would be easier to get around. But Twitter defends this practice with a killer phrase: “We know this approach works because we receive fewer reports of abuse and spam.”
It looks like Twitter is hinting at something: if a known account disappears from search results and subscriber suggestions, it is likely due to the fact that it is associated with abuse and spam. (Twitter recently started blocking all users with “Elon Musk” in their display name because Musk fans got caught on fraudulent tweets from fake Musk accounts. Again, why aren’t they using this on Nazis?) So maybe prominent Republicans Stop encouraging abusive behavior!
But then things got confused when a Twitter bug temporarily blocked a lot of accounts from being auto-suggested in search results. Twitter claims it hasn’t blocked anyone from regular search results. But in fairness to the complainants, auto-suggestion is much more important on Twitter, where usernames are hard to remember. Autocomplete usernames is more noticeable than autocomplete words in Google searches.
But “this influence was not limited to a particular political affiliation or geographic location,” Twitter reports. “Due to this issue, some Democratic politicians were not showing up properly in automatic search suggestions. And most of the accounts affected had nothing to do with politics. “
Again, if they were lying, it would be very uncharacteristic. If a company wants to punish the right, there are many more effective ways to do it. Instead, the company avoids punishing politicians’ accounts, even for blatant violations. But hacking a site with an error is in nature.
But this article won’t convince some people who interpret everything as a conspiracy against them, in part because they don’t understand how the world works. Recently, Republican celebrity and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke temporarily closed his account. You cannot retweet a personal account. But Clark’s followers immediately tweeted that Clark, who brags when Twitter doesn’t ban him for threatening violence, has been shady banned .
Crying “shadow ban!” is an old complaint from people who need more attention, especially extremists. They use it as an excuse when people don’t listen to them because they refuse to admit that everyone just finished their shit. In the 2011 Urban Dictionary , the definition of the word “shadow ban” includes this satirical example of a sentence: “I’ve been posting right-wing bullshit all over the forum, but nobody bites. I think I got banned with shadows. “
So don’t worry about banning shadows. But if you don’t want the priority to be lowered in search results, consider not being an offensive pain in the ass.