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Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

utkusen.substack.com

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Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#8

Post by roughly »

I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years).

Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#9

Post by FirmwareBurner »

utku1337 wrote: post #4
stivatron wrote: post #2

They have to follow the law of the country as tyrannical as it is like they did in Brazil. I hope one day they say fuck it.

shadow ban is not part of that

It is when you get a letter from the government telling you to do that on whatever pretext which doesn't matter at that point because you either comply with the government requests, or have to leave the country otherwise they risk banning, fines or imprisonment/asset seizing.

Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it.

The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.

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