Confirmed: Conservatives get Shadowbanned, Democrats Do not
Vice News has confirmed that prominent Republicans are getting censored and their Democratic counterparts are not. Twitter denies any intentional targeting saying its about behavior and not politics. but upon inspection Ronna McDaniels, the GOP spokeswoman was was shadowbanned, doesn't engage in any noticeable bad behaviors. So why is she banned and the DNC spokesperson is not? In the past video leaked showing Twitter engineers talka bout how they target Trump supporters "because they are all Russian." So is it possible twitter is lying? Or is it an accident that Twitter is targeting behaviors more associated with conservatives? Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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The debate as to whether or not conservatives are being censored on social media continues.
This time, we have a report from Vice News definitively stating that Twitter is shadowbanning prominent Republicans and not their Democratic counterparts, thus playing into the idea that many Republicans and conservatives have said that conservatives face the brunt of censorship and not those on the left.
Now, Twitter denies this.
They state they are not targeting individuals based on what they say or their politics.
That it's all based on behaviors.
In May, we saw a blog post from Twitter where they announced they were going to start promoting healthier conversations.
That they were going to look for certain behaviors and see how certain accounts were connected to others.
So is it possible that the bias within Twitter makes it so they don't understand the behaviors they target are more likely to be associated with conservatives?
What does this Vice News report say?
Why are these prominent Republicans being shadow banned?
And just exactly how has everyone responded to the scandal?
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The story from Vice News.
Twitter is shadow banning prominent Republicans like the RNC chair and Trump Jr.
spokesman.
Several conservative Republican congressmen no longer appear in the auto-populated dropdown search box on Twitter.
Twitter is limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans in search results, a technique known as shadow banning, in what it says is a side effect of its attempts to improve the quality of discourse on the platform.
The Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.
spokesmen no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, Vice News has learned.
It's a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform, and it's the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility.
The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search, but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar.
Democrats are not being shadow-banned in the same way, according to a Vice News review.
McDaniel's counterpart, Democratic Party Chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress, including Reps Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan, all continue to appear in drop-down search results.
Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter's search.
The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view
should concern every American, McDaniel told Vice News in a statement.
Twitter owes the public answers to what's really going on.
Presented with screenshots of the searches, a Twitter spokesperson told Vice News,
"...we are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box
and shipping a change to address this."
Asked why only conservative Republicans appear to be effective and not liberal Democrats,
the spokesperson wrote, "...I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account behavior,
not the content of tweets."
According to EveningExpress.co.uk.
As we have said before, we do not shadowban, a spokesman for Twitter said.
To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets.
In a tweet from Kayvon Bakepour, product lead at Twitter, he said, To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments So if it's not what people are tweeting, why is it that it's conservatives, Republicans, not appearing in search?
There's also an effect of shadowbanning where certain things you tweet don't appear on Twitter at all.
People can't see them.
This has happened to me when I was having a discussion on my own Twitter thread.
I tweeted something about current cultural war politics, and my own replies were blocked from myself.
I couldn't actually see them.
It's much easier to see if someone is not appearing in search, and that's what we can tell right now.
It's much harder to know if certain tweets aren't being made visible.
This is another effect of shadow banning, because we can't see the tweets and we don't know if people tweet.
In a blog post in May from Twitter, they said, There are many new signals we're taking in, most of which
are not visible externally.
Just a few examples include if an account has not confirmed their email address,
if the same person signs up for multiple accounts simultaneously,
accounts that repeatedly tweet and mention accounts that don't follow them,
or behavior that might indicate a coordinated attack.
But this last line is the important one.
We're also looking at how accounts are connected to those that violate our rules and how they interact with each other.
There's a phenomenon on Twitter, mostly among those in the left, where they download what's called a block list.
It's a list of email addresses or accounts that they can simply upload to their account and it will automatically block everyone on the list.
These are political.
I've talked about this in the past and a lot of people have said no.
The block lists are prevent trolls from tweeting at you, and I would say, arguably, that's just not true.
Though many trolls are on these lists, I am actually on some of these lists, and I am blocked by people I have never interacted with, and I don't troll anyone.
I don't go on Twitter, go to people's accounts, and reply to them.
I don't go to high-profile figures and reply to them.
I typically only reply to my friends, and I typically only reply to those who comment on my own tweets.
Yet, for some reason, I appear on many of these blocked lists, and am blocked by prominent individuals I have never interacted with.
This would suggest that the blocklists are actually political, and not based on trolling.
Regardless of why the blocklists form, many Republicans and many Conservatives appear on these blocklists.
And if Twitter is tracking users and who they're connected to, there is a possibility being entertained that if you appear on these lists, Twitter might assume, because you're blocked, That you must be a bad person, and you should be blocked too.
They say, in our early testing in markets around the world, we've already seen this new approach have a positive impact, resulting in a 4% drop in abuse reports from search and 8% fewer abuse reports from conversations.
That means fewer people are seeing tweets that disrupt their experience on Twitter.
To me, that logic comes off as totally insane.
You're reducing your reports by 4%, but what percent of honest conversations are being thrown out because of this?
It is better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer.
In this regard, I would rather have that one troll be able to say that, you know, really dumb thing if it meant that more honest conversations could be had.
But if Twitter's only concern is reducing the amount of reports they're receiving, it's probable that they're getting rid of, they're blocking honest political conversations in order to prevent the small amount of trolling that squeaks through.
And if their goal is to reduce reports of abuse, it does make sense that if you appear on block lists, you're also going to be shadow banned.
If these block lists are then political and Republicans appear on them, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason, but keep in mind, this is all just my speculation.
We don't know exactly why these particular individuals are not appearing in search, and we don't know exactly why certain tweets don't appear in their threads.
Though, we know it is related to Twitter attempting to restrict certain speech to make healthier conversation.
So, Ronna McDaniel, the GOP chairwoman, is one of those people who doesn't appear in search.
Let's then take a look at her Twitter profile to see if she's engaging in any kind of behavior that could be associated with trollish or unhealthy.
When you scroll down and look at what she tweets...
It's just a normal Twitter account.
She doesn't tweet all that often.
In fact, she doesn't actually tweet at other people for the most part.
She does quote tweet, but typically she tweets about political news, things she likes, and quotes.
Ronna McDaniel's Twitter account is a high-profile political Twitter account.
She's a public figure.
And she behaves as such.
People who are in the public light don't often engage in trolling.
Some do.
Some people have made a career off trolling.
But she is a mainstream political figure, and it's unsurprising, then, that her Twitter account is rather tepid.
So why, then, would this rather boring Twitter account be accused or be associated with abuse?
Project Veritas did a story about this several months ago, and James O'Keefe tweeted yesterday, Not only does Twitter shadow ban prominent Republicans, they also consider any Trump supporter who tweets about God, guns, or the flag a Russian bot, as seen in our undercover expose.
And he posted this video from Project Veritas.
unidentified
Let's go to a random beach and just look at the followers.
In this video, this engineer flat out says they mostly just get rid of conservatives and their Russian bots.
And I have to say, to me, that's a bit absurd.
We don't really know how to track bots.
They're making guesses.
He talks about machine learning, but at the end of the day, he's making guesses.
Yes, there are a lot of bots on social media, and a lot of people confuse the word bot with sock puppet.
A sock puppet is when one person is running multiple accounts, and their individual accounts are called sock puppets, and bots are when a computer just randomly tweets.
When computers are randomly tweeting, yeah, it is pretty easy to track.
But if this guy is saying, we look for people who post pictures of Trump and say certain words, and we're mostly scared of conservatives because they're all Russians, it seems like you have a clear bias here.
Not only that, but the engineer referred to them as rednecks.
So, forgive me if I don't take Twitter at their word, and I'm going to say, based on Vice's reporting, I'm going to go with what Vice said here.
And Vice said Twitter is shadowbanning prominent Republicans like the RNC chair and Trump Jr.
spokesman.
And they back it up by showing screenshots of search results where you don't actually see the GOP spokesperson.
The midterms are coming up.
And a lot of people are concerned that Twitter is putting its thumb on the scale.
I'm not entirely convinced that Twitter is doing it deliberately.
They might think they're the good guys, and they might think they're getting rid of trollish behavior.
But it seems that at least whatever they're doing, it is affecting conservatives.
So whether or not they want to claim they're not doing this on purpose, or they don't target people based on politics, something they're doing is targeting people of certain political leanings, and that's going to have a negative impact on how politics functions in this country.
We can definitively say that conservatives are being negatively impacted by actions taken by Twitter that do censor ideas.
Now, as to whether or not Twitter is deliberately doing that, we can't say this, and they've denied it, but all that matters is that it is happening, and now we have a report from Vice News confirming it is happening.
I mean, not only that, but we have the story from Project Veritas where they actually recorded the engineer saying they mostly get rid of conservatives, but hey, Vice News is considered more mainstream and more publicly acceptable.
So if Vice News is going to come out and say this is happening too, I think it's fair to say at this point we should accept that it is happening and Twitter really does need to do something about it.
So let me know what you think in the comments below.
Do you think Twitter is doing this deliberately?
We know it is happening.
The question is, why is it happening?
So comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
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