I’m on mobile so you’ll have to forgive spelling and formatting. But on with the show....
I’m always slightly curious about the shenanigans of other social platforms and saw this story:
Apparently a lot of journalists/bloggers/whatever are getting shadow banned on twitter, meaning people who aren’t followers already can’t find their accounts nor see their tweets. It basically shuts down exposure to the twitter sphere.
In the article there is an explanation of the mechanism:
"If you send the same message to four people, and two of them blocked you, and one reported you, we could assume without ever seeing what the content of the message was, that was generally a negative interaction."
On the surface that makes sense and is fair if applied in an automated way. But as usual if we think through things a little bit we can see some consequences.
Let’s say you are one of these conservative writers. You put out a tweet. Someone who vehmently disagrees with you blocks your account because they don’t want to see your tweets any more. Another person reports your tweet because in his or her mind anything that doesn’t agree is hate speech/white supremacy/whatever the term of the day is.
So now the signals are there for a shadow ban.
And, at least in the US, twitter tilts towards the left side of the political spectrum. So the people tweeting from the right are already fighting an uphill battle. With this system in place it’s just a matter of time until twitter becomes an echo chamber (if it isn’t already). And that is an objectively bad thing.
Of course twitter has the right to impose whatever rules they want on its platform. It’s just stupid as a long term strategy in this case. Over the long run echo chambers are pretty boring and will reduce engagement since it is just the same thing the user already knows over and over again. Only the most fanatical continue in those sorts of environments.
Fortunately I deleted my twitter account over a year ago and am on steem now that is almost impossible to censor.
Keep calm and steem on.