[adnzzzzZ]

A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136, while Elon is explicitly saying what he will do.

[veec_cas_tant]

That tweet is referencing this[0] blog post.

> We do not shadow ban. 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). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:

>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)

> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)

How was Twitter hiding this?

[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...

[HappyTypist]

Twitter's visibility filtering wasn't based on "Your" User Behavior. It was based on what their moderation team decided to filter or not filter.

[veec_cas_tant]

Sure, there was human involvement. Seems irrelevant to the comment I was responding to - Twitter did not hide that they were deranking some Tweets and there doesn't seem to be any difference between their current policy 'revealed' in the Twitter Files and what Elon proposed.

[threeseed]

Problem is that there is a reason shadow bans exist.

It prevents nefarious actors from easily probing the limits of their content moderation processes.

It really is funny how Musk is just taking Twitter back to the start.

[etchalon]

He'll end with the exact same practices, but with a different set of enemies.

[r00fus]

He's going to speedrun learning moderation from "first principles". And we get to watch him learn (just like when he started banning people who changed their handle to mock him).

[charcircuit]

It's already easy to check to see if you or your post is shadowbanned.

[Khaine]

I think the issue is not that this feature exists, but that it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right, while at the same time twitter denied this.

[djleni]

If it was done in secret how could you know it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right?

[Khaine]

Because people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less. It is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.

[godelski]

> people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less.

If we go up to the top comment in this chain we see

> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.

- Elon Musk

So... you're in agreement?

(btw, this isn't shadowbanning. Shadow banning would be 0 likes and 0 retweets and 0 views)

> t is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.

Actually this is my entire complaint with these Twitter Files. They show examples of people getting delisted but do not show the tweets that led to these decisions. That is a CRITICAL element of the story. We can't determine if Twitter was acting in good faith or not without this knowledge. We also have no idea if these examples are selection biased or not. Probably since there's only right leaning stuff and thefp.com is a right wing organization. Maybe Twitter does have a left bias (it probably does) but we sure aren't getting a fair shake.

[djleni]

Okay, so that gets us to “it seems that my account has been shadowbanned.”

Has someone compiled a dataset of users that appear to be shadowbanned, that tweet political content at least some of the time, as well as the political lean they have?

[sigsergv]

The main issue here is not that shadowban exist but fact that twtter officials explicitly denied its existence.

[threeseed]

> but fact that twtter officials explicitly denied its existence

I haven't seen anything here that indicates that it ever did exist.

Limiting reach is different from people not seeing your content at all.

[sigsergv]

Shadowban is not a total hiding content from everyone, it also implies selective hide[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

[username3]

> Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601042125130371072

[layer8]

The OP twitter thread doesn’t seem to be describing shadow banning.