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by chc 1282 days ago
No, everyone knew that this system existed for quite some time. The site's UI even surfaces it by hiding some filtered tweets behind a "view more" button. The conspiracy theory is that the feature was used specifically to silence conservatives for their political views, or that huge conservative accounts that showed up everywhere were somehow suffering from it when their latest brain enhancement pill sale didn't go well enough.
1 comments

Oh really, "everyone knew" ? Apparently not certain journalists, like Matt Binder below, or not even Twitter execs at the time back in 2018 when Trump claimed conservatives were shadow-banned... Classic from the left: "first, ridicule it. Second, strongly challenge it. Finally, pretend this has always been the case and every one knew". Clearly in phase 3 here with yet another fakenews from leftits...

Matt Binder: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601142989061246976/pho...

Tweeter Execs denying: https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-shadow-banning-republicans-...

"The practice of shadow banning essentially involves making posts visible only to the person who created them and invisible to their intended audience"

There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.

Yeah, the Twitter execs specifically denied that they apply filters based on political views. From your own link:

> To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views

The "conspiracy theory" is that Twitter was deliberately targeting conservatives for their politics, not that the site had moderation functions.