Silence From The Shadows

Twitter is failing. They’re failed their users and investors, and they’re driving the platform into the ground. Their staff are failures and even if they were all fired tomorrow, the damage to their reputation as an open speech platform is destroyed. Stocks are down, user numbers are down, and it doesn’t look like there is going to be a light at the end of the tunnel with the way things are going right now.

It all started when Milo Yiannopoulos was unverified earlier this year. To most, this was a blatant act against free speech and a completely political move. What does the removal of the little blue tick do? It doesn’t do much other than make it difficult for the failures that staff Twitter to tell who the real Milo is, although I’m sure they know his handle off by heart now, and make it more difficult to gather impressions. This may seem completely inconsequential as a function, but in reality it is the principle of the act. To single out someone who is incredibly influential and remove something that shows professionalism is either a threat of greater action, or a step towards silencing him altogether. Unfortunately for his 160’000 plus fans, it looks like it’s the latter.

Coming back to the present day us users of the failing platform are now being subjected to a different kind of punishment. One more sinister and subtle than the unverification or the suspensions that have been seen in the past. This new punishment goes unseen and unheard until it’s too late. It’s called a ShadowBan.

Shadow banning (also known as “Stealth banning” and “Hell banning”) is most commonly used by community managers to block content from trolls and spammers. However in this case, it is being used to silence individuals who do not coincide with the heads, the biggest failures, of Twitter, namely those on the new ‘Trust and Safety Council’.

An explanation of what is to be expected from this ‘Council’ by Twitter on their official blog post dated February 9th 2016.

• Safety advocates, academics, and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet;
• Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;
• Community groups with an acute need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention.

“We have more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions joining as inaugural members of the Council. We are thrilled to work with these organizations to ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence on Twitter.”

It looks good on paper doesn’t it. “prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention”. I don’t think anyone would argue that these are fantastic goals to try and achieve. That would be the case if they use the dictionary definitions of these words instead of their own interpretations. Criticism to Twitter is equal to abuse. Disagreement to Twitter is equal to harassment. Jokes to Twitter are equal to bullying. So you begin to see the problem here? This ‘Council’ isn’t made up of anyone who is conservative, but only far left companies and charities that fall into Twitter’s ‘ideal thinkers’ category. One such company is “FeministFrequency” headed by shrieking ‘gamer’ Anita Sarkeesian. You know, the same woman that believes that games are sexist because they contain parts of the human anatomy. So with this in mind, we can see where this ‘Council’ will lead Twitter. There is no debate, there are no opposing views, just a hive mind of regressive left thinking.

I bring this all up because it’s a pretty damn big coincidence that as soon as this ‘Council’ is formed, a lot of influential figures start to Tweet less. It’s a pretty damn big coincidence that we don’t see some familiar faces on our timelines anymore. Maybe that is due to the new format, the failures of Twitter have announced for the Timeline which makes it so you will see Tweets in order of relevance rather than be ordered chronologically (possibly another reason why the stocks are down). Twitter says that it is an “opt-in” feature that will only impact you if you go to your settings and ask for it to happen. They say that. I however, think that something different is happening.

ShadowBanning is essentially a silencer. It targets the audience of the speaker more than the speaker themselves. I say this because even though an account is able to be ShadowBanned, the audience won’t know anything about it. It is used as a type of muffle on the speaker. In Twitter terms, it mean that the speaker can Tweet something and it seem completely normal. It will show on the speakers timeline and also on their profile. However, to followers, the tweet will never appear on the timeline. You wouldn’t see anything, making it look like a tweet was never posted. The only time you would see that Tweet, is if you went to the speakers profile. This is why it’s sinister. It’s more 1984 than 2016 and it’s going to be a huge problem for anyone that opposes the new ‘Council’. What makes this worse than a suspension, or an unverification, is that it is hard to detect and hard to prove. Without the common label of “The account you are trying to view has been suspended” people will not be able to oppose the verdict this ‘Council’ has made. People won’t even know a verdict has been reached.

This isn’t the first time that someone has noticed ShadowBanning being put into effect. Paul Dietrich (@Paulmd199 ) noticed something strange back in October 2015 and decided to write an article about it. Here are some parts from that article.

Here is the link to this article: members.efn.org/~paulmd/OwnWork/AdventuresinCensorship.pdf

As seen in this article, Dietrich compares what is going on in his feed to what Twitter had proclaimed the ‘Anti Abuse Filter’ would do.

This clearly shows that Twitter intends to hide certain tweets from people in order to stop ‘abuse’. Suppressing these individual Tweets from certain users accounts depending where you are in the world and for a certain amount of time is not technically ShadowBanning. However, coupled with the new Timeline update that makes relevant Tweets appear instead of them appearing in chronological order, it has the same effect. A Tweet goes out from a user that this tool is being used against, that user’s followers do not see it as Twitter has hidden it from followers for a certain time, the Tweet gains no reach, it doesn’t appear on the timeline when it is eventually unhidden as it is not relevant enough to qualify. Like Dietrich says, “Censorship, that doesn’t look like censorship”.

After being published by The Washington Post, and Motherboard, Twitter came out and gave a statement in response.

“Earlier this week, an issue caused some Tweets to be delivered inconsistently across browsers and geographies. We’ve since resolved the issue though affected Tweets may take additional time to correct.” Twitter declined to comment further to both media outlets. If you ask me, it certainly hasn’t been fixed. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

This could be classed as ShadowBanning or just filtering, there is no argument that this is censorship.

Here is an example of how it works

(credit to @St_Gaz )

For the past week a few influential figures have spoken about getting ShadowBanned. None of these figures are from the regressive left? Surely it can’t be that obvious. It is. Here is a Tweet made by Mercedes Carrera

Here are some statements by those that have been ShadowBanned:

Andrew Auernheimer (@rabite ) gave this statement to me after claiming Twitter Shadowbanned him:

“The Marxist establishment had me kidnapped from my childhood birthplace, falsely imprisoned for years and tortured. The only thing I got out of that was a social media microphone but it seems they stole that from me too.”

Mark Kern (@Grummz) also gave me his input after we talked about ShadowBanning and filtering:

“My concern is that Twitter isn’t doing users (or its shareholders) any good when it randomly filters and shadowbans users. At best it makes the site look very buggy, at worst it is the most insidious form of censorship.”

Mark also took the time to do a small experiment on who couldn’t see the Tweets he made. These are the results from February 15th – February 17th

Margaret MacLennan (@MargaretsBelly) gave me this statement when I asked her how she felt after realising she had been ShadowBanned:

“I’m flattered! Twitter thinks my jokes are so savage and my beliefs are so wrong that they’ve gone to the trouble of outright shadowbanning my timeline. I’m putting this on my resume! Nothing I say is untrue so they can’t remove my account. Shutting down my ability to communicate is their next best option.”

Twitter is not the only social media platform to incorporate these kind of tactics into the mix. Facebook did it with quite the controversy. H3H3’s page SoFloBro (a parody of SoFlo) was taken down without notification, without appeal and without warning. The most concerning thing however about that entire process, was the aftermath. Everyone who had liked SoFloBro were automatically forced to ‘like’ the original page, SoFlo.

Everyone is also aware that Reddit has ShadowBanning in it’s arsenal to deal with people of a different opinion.

The scary thing with this whole scenario is that people who have a different opinion to the ‘Council’ will never be able to flourish, nor be able to express themselves to their followers and friends due to the silencing of any political speech that doesn’t coincide with their own. We can’t notice this new punishment system like we can the traditional. There are NO warnings, NO appeal processes and NO notifications. The question is how they will move on from this. Target specific accounts? Already doing that. Hide the Tweets that offend the ‘Council’? Done. Next they will be coming to our houses to cut out our tongues and break our fingers so we cannot disobey their status quo. Extreme? They have done everything else. It’s only a matter of time before we can only put certain words into the box at all and anything else comes up as a bunch of asterisks.

I have said it before in a previous article, “This is no ‘Council’ this is a dictatorship”. So what are we going to do about it?

Artwork courtesy of Vey Graphics (@VeyGraphics)

http://www.veygraphics.com/