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by your own measure then communists and socialists have gotten control of platforms like Reddit and is no longer a viable platform
Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
51–60 of 209 posts
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#52I 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 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 what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.
Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.
Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.
After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".
X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).
Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).
Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#53I 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 guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views.
It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.
Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#54They won elections for years with a puppet candidate. Now there is no puppet candidate, and they want to block this one by using all the power of the state.
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Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#55Elon Musk loves to brand himself as a “free speech absolutist” but when it comes to authoritarian regimes like Turkey, that principle evaporates instantly. Pre-Musk Twitter, for all its flaws, at least pushed back against censorship requests - now, X bends the knee without hesitation.
Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit.
Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#56The Turkish government definitely has a hand in this situation. Otherwise, I think the fact that I see almost no posts from an account that has notifications enabled and that I follow indicates a flawed algorithm. I congratulate the friend who shared this post. He touched on a very nice, detailed topic...
Possibly but also plausible that they just do it anyway. The post-acquisition Twitter "shadowban" a lot of contents and users in-organically and algorithmically in their attempt to change its content-novelty-meritocracy culture into cash based influence economy, with not significant, but not at all negligible, successes.
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#57Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#58Earlier 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.
On a second reading, your interpretation might be the right one, it's not super-clear.
Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
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Re: Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which interestingly was almost exclusively far right accounts. He shadow banned 3-4 and kicked a few others off X premium (so they don't get paid for tweets). Which X claimed was for spamming him and others after they disagreed with him over supporting H1B visas. But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
>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…
Ted Turner sold off CNN decades ago. I think it's now owned by whatever became of Time Warner, which is now in the hands of right-wing billionaires with ideologies similar to Bezos and Murdoch.