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Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

utkusen.substack.com

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Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#141

Post by SilverElfin »

socrates1998 wrote: post #25

[flagged]

> Elon will continue to mess with the algorithm until he gets his political goals.

Twitter/X has open sourced their algorithm (https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm). So what do you mean by “mess with the algorithm”? And how do you characterize the extreme moderation (AKA censorship) practiced by old Twitter? For example when they banned a sitting president on the flimsiest reasoning, that even their own blog post justifying it could not describe, that their former CEO agreed was a big mistake?

> It's too bad that most people don't care about fascists getting control of these huge media platforms.

Define “fascist”. These days it seems to just mean “someone not aligned with one end of the political spectrum”. The bottom line is Twitter/X is far less censored today than it was a few years ago and it isn’t even close. The vast scheme of censorship it practiced previously dramatically altered elections worldwide.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#142

Post by SilverElfin »

KerrAvon wrote: post #57
loeg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is still the best of the twitter clones.

[flagged]

That’s quite a pejorative, to claim that someone else is having their “brain cooked” because they follow a platform that is less censored than you’d like. Are you sure you support free speech when you describe being exposed to views you don’t support in that way? I think being open to new ideas, and therefore supporting free speech, means being comfortable with ideas being discussed that you don’t like.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#143

Post by _DeadFred_ »

lovich wrote: post #92
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos? None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business. "If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinfor…

I know it was a rhetorical question but Phil Knight and his son with Laika studios are the only example of rich guys in media who are actually doing it for the love of the game

Only thing Phil Knights loves more than the game is exploiting child labour in impoverished areas.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#144

Post by jrflowers »

drak0n1c wrote: post #111
panarky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013. I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand. They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out wh…

Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and…

> (see Twitter Files)

Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#145

Post by terminalbraid »

internetter wrote: post #79
ebrugulec123 wrote: post #19

Even if X is acting under a court order in Turkey, the shadow-ban–like behavior on a global platform is concerning. Hiding posts algorithmically goes beyond legal compliance and raises serious questions about whether X is protecting free speech or quietly facilitating censorship.

AI comment?

Long dashes in "shadow-ban–like" is a telltale sign

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#146

Post by pessimizer »

mnw21cam wrote: post #44
pegasus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my understanding of the article it says they did get a court order: "Elon Musk didn’t say anything about the situation and X didn’t defend freedom of speech. They only said there was a court order and they couldn’t do anything. But many people believe they should have defended free speech."

My reading of the article is that they had a court order telling them to close down the original account, but they seem to be shadow-banning the new account without one.

Mine too. But that sounds to me like they're protecting the new account by limiting its reach, not being helpful to the Turkish government. People who seek it out will still see it, but it may pass unseen for a little while from Erdogan who could get a new court order to shut it down with a 30-second phone call.

Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#147

Post by dragonwriter »

terminalbraid wrote: post #145
internetter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI comment?

Long dashes in "shadow-ban–like" is a telltale sign

There is no em-dash in the comment; there is an en-dash used in place of a hyphen where one of the terms joined is itself a hyphenated term.

Edit: Note the parent has since been edited and previously said the tell was an “em-dash”, but now says “long dashes” in reference to a single correct use of the shortest—except in fonts with narrow digits, where the figure dash might be shorter—dash.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#149

Post by xp84 »

raziel2p wrote: post #102
xp84 wrote: post #97

I continue to be skeptical of hanging hopes for 'free speech' on expecting free-as-in-beer, ad-supported, privately owned websites to actively promote the things that you write. Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor…

How is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.

- Purchasing advertising can be done from a variety of actors not just a couple social media platforms.

- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.

Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.

Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

#150

Post by hashstring »

SilverElfin wrote: post #141
socrates1998 wrote: post #25

[flagged]

> Elon will continue to mess with the algorithm until he gets his political goals. Twitter/X has open sourced their algorithm ( https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm ). So what do you mean by “mess with the algorithm”? And how do you characterize the extreme moderation (AKA censorship) practiced by old Twitter? For example when they banned a sitting president on the flimsiest reasoning, that even their own blog po…

[flagged]
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