Trump Claims Twitter Engaged in 'Illegal Practice' of 'Shadow Banning' Republicans

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5. Twitter Is Not 'Shadow Banning' Republicans New York Magazine

Twitter Is Not ‘Shadow Banning’ Republicans



http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/07/twitter-is-not-shadow-banning-republicans.html



July 25, 2018 4:36 pm
By Brian Feldman @bafeldman


The concept of the “shadowban” has existed practically since the inception of the web forum. The idea is simple: Instead of banning a user outright and informing them of such punishment, a shadowban makes a user’s post visible only to themselves. In other words, they think that they’re still part of a community, but nobody is able to see or interact with them. The shadowban is useful in that rather than someone immediately being locked out and possibly retaliating by, for example, making a new account, the user fades away gradually due to the lack of interaction from other users.

As forums have evolved into social-media platforms, the shadowban and its descendants have come along with them. Facebook argued that the best way to dispel misinformation from places like Infowars, which argues that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a staged hoax, was to secretly minimize their distribution in the site’s News Feed — a similar but not identical tactic. I myself have previously argued — tongue in cheek — that Twitter should shadowban (or “hellban”) President Donald Trump, who most recently threatened a cataclysmic war against Iran. The idea being that he gets the feeling of communicating with his followers while his actual posts are hidden from the (volatile) world.

More than anywhere else, though, the shadowban has persisted among the conspiracy-minded, as a great weapon of censorship, generally thought to be perpetrated by liberal Silicon Valley operatives at the expense of conservatives. That right-wing voices are being “shadow banned” by Twitter and Facebook has become all but an article of faith among internet-native conservative activists and publishers — despite little evidence to support the claim.


It’s no surprise, then, that a Vice article claiming that Twitter is “shadow banning” Republicans has already taken hold in the minds of the most online right-wingers. At issue, though, is not “banning” but Twitter’s search mechanism. Usually, Twitter will automatically complete a search query and suggest an account when a user begins typing in Twitter’s search bar. If you type in “Donald,” for example, brings up Trump’s account as an easily accessible hyperlink, so that you don’t have to click through to the results page; if you type in “Hillary,” you’ll get a similar autocomplete suggestion of Hillary Clinton....................................



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