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> Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twi

by wil421 6y ago

> Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40% from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook. That is a fall from 90% to 12%. In the February hearings Facebook and Twitter were between them sending me over 200,000 readers a day. Now they are between them sending me 3,000 readers a day. To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister – people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline. My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform. The last sentence is what strikes me the most. Maybe he was being paranoid but if your own family is telling you they are not getting a notification then something is wrong.

andy_ppp 6y ago
So is there a conspiracy here or has this guy’s blog just been flagged innocently. I had no idea shadow banning on these platforms existed, it’s extremely scary that they are shaping debate this way silently.
- kortex 6y ago
  I have little evidence, but if someone asked me to risk my life on the existence of shadowbanning/post nerfing on facebook, yep I'd risk it. They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight. The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed. I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis. I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.
  - martin_a 6y ago
    > At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight. I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before. edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally. edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"
    - sneak 6y ago
      Sometimes-censorship of our basic communications in society (increasingly mediated by a small number of military-adjacent organizations like Microsoft and Amazon) is one of the biggest existential threats to a free society. Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency. This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    FB feed has been crapfest for very long time. It keeps showing me stuff that is easily 1-2 weeks old and I've seen it 10x in the feed. New stuff buried deep. Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order. Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before. FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.
- bavell 6y ago
  Maybe I'm just cynical but there's not a shred of doubt in my mind these companies regularly engage in shadowbanning among many other nefarious activities. They're trying to make money and you are the product after all. They could care less about you or their impact to society.
- gadders 6y ago
  The recent Twitter "hack" showed that the internal Twitter screens had options to ban users from Search or Trending. It's been widely complained about for years by people on the Right. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-15-at-9.40.59-PM.jpg https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Sho...
- marvin 6y ago
  Of course it isn't innocent. That doesn't even measure up to Occam's Razor, let alone some critical thought. There's political and intelligence participation clearly visible just beneath the surface every step of the way in this persecution. No reason to believe it stops here. I'll readily agree it's scary. Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.
  - bb123 6y ago
    How does "massive international deep state conspiracy to censor reporting on a trial" vs "innocently/negligently flagged due to x" not hold up to Occam's Razor?
    - eternalban 6y ago
      This is a fair question. A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs. On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations. Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority. Occam's Razor.
      - rmrfstar 6y ago
        These networks seem to have abandoned whatever sense of decency they had in the early years of the Georgetown set. We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.
- colordrops 6y ago
  I follow several dozen very left wing / progressive accounts on twitter and haven't seen any of them on my timeline for weeks. Examples: Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts. I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    There were also people banned on reddit r/politics for posting about various human rights abuses from the US and US police. I think there might be something to it too.
    - colordrops 6y ago
      /r/politics was taken over by David Brock and crew around 2016. /r/conspiracy has seen a takeover by the right wing equivalents over the last year or so, since the banning of /r/t_d
      - Daishiman 6y ago
        It was taken over long before banning of t_d. It was sock puppet accounts and pizzagate stuff way before.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  There are numerous accounts of this happening on most media oriented platforms. From simply removing followers to flagging your account as unsafe so it does not appear as a recommendation or public listing anymore. just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.
- neves 6y ago
  The real problem is the opacity of the algorithms. We can't generate evidences that they are censoring the debate. The lack of transparency is a menace for democracy.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Here's Twitter engineers admitting to it on hidden camera. https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-engineers-to-ban-a-way-of-talking-through-shadow-banning/ https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-e...
gadders 6y ago
First the censors came for the right-wingers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not right-wing.... That's the problem with putting in place censorship. Sometimes it affects people you like.
- HugeAcumen 6y ago
  Thanks, I was wondering how this was the fault of the left. */s
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I don't think it's helpful to blame things on broad groupings of the political spectrum like "the left". But a discussion on how scary it is the social media platforms are shaping debate needs to acknowledge the existence of large, powerful movements demanding that they build the tools and precedent to do so.
- mft_ 6y ago
  I don’t think freedom of speech is a left-right wing issue. There are people who strongly support free speech on both sides, and likewise there are censors on both sides. It’s more of an authoritarian-libertarian axis issue.
  - gadders 6y ago
    I think in general terms as a political philosophy I would agree with you. I think in terms of how restrictions on speech are implemented by Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it absolutely seems to be more used against right wing sources.
    - pmachinery 6y ago
      Craig Murray doesn't seem particularly right-wing to me. Meanwhile, here someone describes not seeing several dozen left-wing sources on Twitter for weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578659
zaarn 6y ago
FB is known to throttle successful content in order to force blog owners to buy adverts instead of relying on organic growth.
- echelon 6y ago
  That's sick. Why do we tolerate this nonsense?
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    We don't, we just don't have any power to stop it, other than shrugging and moving away from FB ourselves, which a lot of people have done already.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      "We don't..." I turn to look at the 50 people that don't while the billions of other FB users have no idea about it. This is why you have no power to stop it.
      - rStar 6y ago
        don’t work at facebook
        laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
        "i don't work here. I just volunteer several hours of my day creating engaging content to a billion dollar company for free"
    - sippingjippers 6y ago
      Don't shrug it off, shame and peer pressure those around you who continue to use it, like smoking or drunk driving. Network effects work in reverse too
  - est31 6y ago
piokoch 6y ago
This is the dawn of new era, where freedom of speech is gone, even though in theory you can stand on the corner of the street and shout to people about things. This starts to be much worst than communistic censorship - in communistic Poland censorship office was obliged to mark places where the "offensive" content was removed. Facebook just erases that what is "offensive". I hope that this will be the moment when people start to think if it is really so good that communication platforms keep censoring "improper content". At first majority was happy that some of those they didn't like and didn't like their views were removed. Now people are learning a hard lesson - anyone views might suddenly become offensive and you will be done, gone, forgotten, fired (see what happen to J.K. Rowling or Bari Weiss).
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >This is the dawn of new era sorry but how is this a new era? George Carlin caused a row with his Seven Dirty Words on national television because you couldn't swear. Everything that is mainstream is basically devoid of edgy or offensive content because advertisers want entertainment and nothing else. When you wanted out of the mainstream commentary or scathing critiques you always had to go into subcultures, magazines, the arts, standup or whatever else.
chippy 6y ago
In another post on HN today the users overwhelmingly agreed that "Yes, social media should censor stuff".
neves 6y ago
Now we understand the concerns about TikTok
laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
> US companies committing censorship Can't the EFF and ACLU team up on this?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  This is what the guy is complaining about: Facebook and Twitter are still hosting his posts and tweets, but that some of his followers claim not to be getting notifications about every single one of those posts/tweets. Facebook has auto-throttle: if you post too many times within a span, it stops sending notifications about every post to your followers unless they interact with one or more of your posts during that span. This is desired behavior, by 99% of people, because we don't want our newsfeed flooded by that one annoying friend with no life, unless we choose to follow up. So no, the EFF and ACLU can't team up on this because there's no active censorship, or even passive censorship.
  - laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
    If you host something but false-positive flag it as spam[0], did you host it? [0] which let's be honest, is what happened when you casually say "auto-throttle"

by wil421 6y ago

andy_ppp 6y ago

So is there a conspiracy here or has this guy’s blog just been flagged innocently. I had no idea shadow banning on these platforms existed, it’s extremely scary that they are shaping debate this way silently.

kortex 6y ago
I have little evidence, but if someone asked me to risk my life on the existence of shadowbanning/post nerfing on facebook, yep I'd risk it. They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight. The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed. I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis. I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.
- martin_a 6y ago
  > At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight. I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before. edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally. edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"
  - sneak 6y ago
    Sometimes-censorship of our basic communications in society (increasingly mediated by a small number of military-adjacent organizations like Microsoft and Amazon) is one of the biggest existential threats to a free society. Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency. This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  FB feed has been crapfest for very long time. It keeps showing me stuff that is easily 1-2 weeks old and I've seen it 10x in the feed. New stuff buried deep. Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order. Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before. FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.
bavell 6y ago
Maybe I'm just cynical but there's not a shred of doubt in my mind these companies regularly engage in shadowbanning among many other nefarious activities. They're trying to make money and you are the product after all. They could care less about you or their impact to society.
gadders 6y ago
The recent Twitter "hack" showed that the internal Twitter screens had options to ban users from Search or Trending. It's been widely complained about for years by people on the Right. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Shot-2020-07-15-at-9.40.59-PM.jpg https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Sho...
marvin 6y ago
Of course it isn't innocent. That doesn't even measure up to Occam's Razor, let alone some critical thought. There's political and intelligence participation clearly visible just beneath the surface every step of the way in this persecution. No reason to believe it stops here. I'll readily agree it's scary. Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.
- bb123 6y ago
  How does "massive international deep state conspiracy to censor reporting on a trial" vs "innocently/negligently flagged due to x" not hold up to Occam's Razor?
  - eternalban 6y ago
    This is a fair question. A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs. On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations. Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority. Occam's Razor.
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      These networks seem to have abandoned whatever sense of decency they had in the early years of the Georgetown set. We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.
colordrops 6y ago
I follow several dozen very left wing / progressive accounts on twitter and haven't seen any of them on my timeline for weeks. Examples: Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts. I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There were also people banned on reddit r/politics for posting about various human rights abuses from the US and US police. I think there might be something to it too.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    /r/politics was taken over by David Brock and crew around 2016. /r/conspiracy has seen a takeover by the right wing equivalents over the last year or so, since the banning of /r/t_d
    - Daishiman 6y ago
      It was taken over long before banning of t_d. It was sock puppet accounts and pizzagate stuff way before.
Shivetya 6y ago
There are numerous accounts of this happening on most media oriented platforms. From simply removing followers to flagging your account as unsafe so it does not appear as a recommendation or public listing anymore. just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.
neves 6y ago
The real problem is the opacity of the algorithms. We can't generate evidences that they are censoring the debate. The lack of transparency is a menace for democracy.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Here's Twitter engineers admitting to it on hidden camera. https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-engineers-to-ban-a-way-of-talking-through-shadow-banning/ https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-e...

gadders 6y ago

First the censors came for the right-wingers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not right-wing.... That's the problem with putting in place censorship. Sometimes it affects people you like.

HugeAcumen 6y ago
Thanks, I was wondering how this was the fault of the left. */s
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don't think it's helpful to blame things on broad groupings of the political spectrum like "the left". But a discussion on how scary it is the social media platforms are shaping debate needs to acknowledge the existence of large, powerful movements demanding that they build the tools and precedent to do so.
mft_ 6y ago
I don’t think freedom of speech is a left-right wing issue. There are people who strongly support free speech on both sides, and likewise there are censors on both sides. It’s more of an authoritarian-libertarian axis issue.
- gadders 6y ago
  I think in general terms as a political philosophy I would agree with you. I think in terms of how restrictions on speech are implemented by Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it absolutely seems to be more used against right wing sources.
  - pmachinery 6y ago
    Craig Murray doesn't seem particularly right-wing to me. Meanwhile, here someone describes not seeing several dozen left-wing sources on Twitter for weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578659

zaarn 6y ago

FB is known to throttle successful content in order to force blog owners to buy adverts instead of relying on organic growth.

echelon 6y ago
That's sick. Why do we tolerate this nonsense?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  We don't, we just don't have any power to stop it, other than shrugging and moving away from FB ourselves, which a lot of people have done already.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    "We don't..." I turn to look at the 50 people that don't while the billions of other FB users have no idea about it. This is why you have no power to stop it.
    - rStar 6y ago
      don’t work at facebook
      - laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
        "i don't work here. I just volunteer several hours of my day creating engaging content to a billion dollar company for free"
  - sippingjippers 6y ago
    Don't shrug it off, shame and peer pressure those around you who continue to use it, like smoking or drunk driving. Network effects work in reverse too
- est31 6y ago

piokoch 6y ago

This is the dawn of new era, where freedom of speech is gone, even though in theory you can stand on the corner of the street and shout to people about things. This starts to be much worst than communistic censorship - in communistic Poland censorship office was obliged to mark places where the "offensive" content was removed. Facebook just erases that what is "offensive". I hope that this will be the moment when people start to think if it is really so good that communication platforms keep censoring "improper content". At first majority was happy that some of those they didn't like and didn't like their views were removed. Now people are learning a hard lesson - anyone views might suddenly become offensive and you will be done, gone, forgotten, fired (see what happen to J.K. Rowling or Bari Weiss).

Barrin92 6y ago
>This is the dawn of new era sorry but how is this a new era? George Carlin caused a row with his Seven Dirty Words on national television because you couldn't swear. Everything that is mainstream is basically devoid of edgy or offensive content because advertisers want entertainment and nothing else. When you wanted out of the mainstream commentary or scathing critiques you always had to go into subcultures, magazines, the arts, standup or whatever else.

chippy 6y ago

In another post on HN today the users overwhelmingly agreed that "Yes, social media should censor stuff".

neves 6y ago

Now we understand the concerns about TikTok

laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago

> US companies committing censorship Can't the EFF and ACLU team up on this?

gamblor956 6y ago
This is what the guy is complaining about: Facebook and Twitter are still hosting his posts and tweets, but that some of his followers claim not to be getting notifications about every single one of those posts/tweets. Facebook has auto-throttle: if you post too many times within a span, it stops sending notifications about every post to your followers unless they interact with one or more of your posts during that span. This is desired behavior, by 99% of people, because we don't want our newsfeed flooded by that one annoying friend with no life, unless we choose to follow up. So no, the EFF and ACLU can't team up on this because there's no active censorship, or even passive censorship.
- laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
  If you host something but false-positive flag it as spam[0], did you host it? [0] which let's be honest, is what happened when you casually say "auto-throttle"