A hacked document reveals that Twitter bosses use a list of alternative media accounts to shadow ban people who speak out against the establishment.
The social media giant uses the list to artificially suppress tweets and hide them from people’s timelines, without the users’ knowing they are being censored.
One of the pages of the 82-page document, clearly shows the majority of the accounts as being either conservative or alternative in nature.
BYPASS THE CENSORS
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https://twitter.com/DoRtChristians/status/843516280141430784
Allnewspipeline.com reports:
In February 2016, Breitbart News received confirmation from an inside source that Twitter had been “shadow banning” politically inconvenient users, meaning users that shared articles and information that does not align with the ideology of those that run Twitter. “Shadow banning” is described in the following manner:
Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.
For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.
According to that report, Twitter was using their “stealth banning” in order to influence the 2016 presidential election, by censoring the “news” their users were exposed to. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been accused in the past of running a “systemic campaign” against conservatives, as well as “purging” conservatives from the social media platform, in order to “silence conservative voices online.”
THE LIST
According to the list making the rounds on Twitter, hashtag #shadowban, it alleges this is just one page of 82 pages which consist of thousands of names. The list is prefaced with the following statement:
“For the time being, only a partial list of the most notorious accounts is being provided due to the literally thousands of accounts on the list. The list appears to have been created more by an algorithm using filters for ‘buzzwords’ than just popular accounts (this assessment was made due to the fact that an entire portion of the list contained back-to-back “deplorable” accounts with either deplorable in the user name, or profile description). Twitter also uses a filter that has an “admin delay” in which a post is delayed for view until its filter approves the post. If the person is low priority, it will normally take only 15-20 seconds once it runs through the buzzwords. If it’s high profile, it may take manual approval. The “Impressions” are reduced with a limit capacity which is why you’re seeing less and less likes and retweets from conservative accounts: because limiting impressions means less people seeing tweets from these accounts in their regular news feeds. Ironically, Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0 are not on the list. The anomaly in the list is that not all on the list are Trump supporters. Rumor has it remaining docs with headers will be on 4Chan”
The one page of 82 of the list of alleged accounts being shadow banned, via image shown below:
A few points about the list, the names and the reference to the “deplorables” in the statement above the list.
Point one: Many of these names are clearly “conservative” in nature, and many well known in the truth movement.
Point Two: The fact that the statement specifically mentions “back-to-back” deplorable accounts” clearly indicates that they are specifically targeting Trump supporters because users did not start adding the word “deplorable” onto their names, or profiles, until Hillary Clinton claimed publicly that Trump supporters belonged in a basket of “deplorables,” which was highly controversial during the election cycle, and to which Trump and his supporters started using as a badge of honor. Point Three: The fact that so many deplorables are supposedly on the remaining pages of this “list,” if real, would mean that Twitter was still adding names to their supposed “shadow ban” list after Breitbart exposed their shadow banning practices, because their article was in February 2016, and Clinton’s statement was in September 2016.
EVIDENCE VIA ANALYTICS OF TWITTER SHADOW BANNING PRACTICES
While attempting to verify the veracity of this Twitter shadow ban list #1of82, which I will reiterate now, we could not confirm, nor debunk, I did run across an article from someone on this list, published before the list was published publicly, which provides data, via analytics, that show that Twitter has been “shadow banning” his posts and shares.
Middle row, 14th name from the top, is @Cernovich, which is the account of Mike Cernovich, who owns the popular website Danger & Play. On March 14, 2017, six days ago, Cernovich showed via screen shots of his analytics tools, that he had gained an average of 500 followers per day, until March 11, 2017, when those numbers showed a dramatic decrease to average approximately 100 a day, with one of those days showing only 28 new followers.
To go from a high of 919 on March 5th to a low of 28 just nine days later, is indicative of a very big problem.
Likewise, despite losing no net followers, his impressions saw a 30% to 50% decrease, meaning what he was sharing was not being seen by his followers. His average retweet, where he shares a post and others hit the retweet button to share it with their followers, dropped from an average of 800 per post, to 173, in just a months time.
See the other screen shots of the charts he uses to prove his assertions.
BOTTOM LINE
Analytics do not lie, and the fact that Cernovich provided evidence that shows conclusively that new followers, retweets and impressions decreased in such a dramatic fashion, in conjunction with his name being on this alleged partial list of names that Twitter has targeted for censorship via their “shadow bans,” offers quite a bit of credence to the legitimacy of this partial list.
Each and every one of the names on this list shown above, should be going through their Twitter analytics, which tracks impressions, engagement, links clicks, likes and more. Users can choose time frames, so they can compare last year with this year, months compared to previous months, by setting specified ranges, to see if they too have suffered significant decreases in the aforementioned areas as Cernovich did.
I go over a few of the specific names on the list above in the video below.
Sean Adl-Tabatabai
The evidence presented in the article is far from conclusive, but it is good that people are looking into the question of whether Twitter targets individual accounts based on politics. I have personally witnessed many signs that Twitter is not a regular public company offering a uniform quality of service to all customers who obey its terms of usage.
From my account, @misc_CIA_victim, I have difficult sending notifications of any kind to large classes of users. Also, much of Twitter is inhabited by various forms of commercial and political web-bots. The largest class of these pretend to originate in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar and are only Arab language. At one point, they would follow in mass anyone who followed them. My account went from 120 followers to 3500 within 2 weeks, based mostly on following these Arab bots that only tweet in Arabic. When I looked at translations of what they were saying, these all appeared to be machine generated. After that period, twitter changed their algorithm to end that loophole. They are trying to reduce the number of the fake followers of these fake bots which all followed each other. I would use crowdireapp to notice when someone stopped following me, and over and over it was a fake Arabian bot that went from 200K+ following to 0 or 10.