Twitter: Free Speech Central

ImgUrl - Twitter Message

Twitter seems to be banning "controversial" content more and more, and finding reasons to justify doing so.

TechCrunch - March 1st - Twitter using analytics to ban people

Tech Crunch: Those getting banned complain that Twitter is denying them free speech, but Twitter’s Rules seem to indicate that when speech promotes hate and harassment, there are repercussions. Like in the real world, you still have the right to say things or discuss your beliefs, but your words may have consequences. (Such as getting fired from your job.) “We aim to only act on accounts when we’re confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive,” says Twitter of its updated algorithms, in a blog post. “Since these tools are new we will sometimes make mistakes, but know that we are actively working to improve and iterate on them everyday,” its blog post explains.

There's a theory going around that Twitter is making "power" followers that follow accounts that are flagged, those with a big user base that follow the flagged account

So in a hypothetical situation you have 100 followers, and 10 of these people have large amount of followers and you engage in sharing a page that twitter has flagged, instead of shadow banning the account it seems they're making it more difficult for those with a large following to find the tweets from that account, sometimes you get shown "this tweet is unavailable" and you know the other people 90 can see this tweet, but you cannot, because they can't spread that information out there as effectively as you can, so they're using Analytical Data to silence people by proxy.

With the whole "Fake News" epidemic it seems more and more censorship is on it's way, now I'm fully behind banning "Hate Speech" those who post to intentionally bully another person or group, what I'm not behind is them barring large accounts due to the user-base of that account having "passionate" members, let's just bring politics into this, since everything is about politics nowadays.. but.. say Right Winged accounts having a large fanbase, a Left Wing Account posts something controversial or something against the right wingers views, so the Right Winged account members, let's say 15-20% decide to try and defend the Right Wing page, and go about it the right way, being ethical and polite, but using facts and starting a general debate, now out of spite Left Wingers may flag those posts and they get a -1 in Twitter Analytics Scoring.

So 15-20% of that group are flagged for whatever reason.

Now let's say another 20-30% decide to go about things the wrong way and attack and harass the Left Wing account and these all get flagged too.

So they all get a -1 for every flag in twitter analytics.

And let's say every post that got flagged had some mention of both pages names like @LeftWingPage and @RightWingPage

Right wing page would get penalized because some users chose to get involved with politics and then the major players who got flagged would no longer be able to see that page's tweets using the search function or through recommended tweets or whatever.

50% of those didn't engage in the debate at all so they're able to still see the page because none of them were flagged en masse, this page loses a lot of "twitter engagements" and through analytics the page is now essentially dead in the water because all of the people actively engaging in that page were silently censored from the posts.

Essentially this is a way to silently delay information from spreading, like the wiki leaks page for instance, if Twitter deems their articles fake news, or encouraging harassment they won't ban you, they'll make you censor yourself by making you think the information isn't around because you're too lazy to look further down the page for that information.

This is all a theory, I have no way of giving you absolute proof, but this is what I feel is going on behind the scenes with social media, censorship is on the rise and free speech isn't free anymore.


Note to Mods: hopefully I posted this in the right place, if not please may you notify me which forum it should have been placed in then I'll make sure I learn for next time.

Thank you for taking your time reading my post, have a great day!

a reply to: zGrimReapah

Every Trump tweet and the replies within each of his tweets is proof enough for me that twitter is an alt-left website. Since joining last August, I have witnessed many bannings and message displays.

For instance, Sargon of Akkads account was recently hacked but the owner (@Jack) banned him anyway, so Sargon made a YT video showing how easy it was to hack his account so as to prove it was hacked - his twitter account was eventually reinstated, and then hacked again about 5 days ago.

Anything promoting pizzagate and asking questions that include the words 'John and Tony Podesta' is also targeted.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

I heard the hacker was the one who gave Sargon of Akkad's account back, he hacked the account to show how unsecure his account was and then proceeded to help him make it more secure.

I understand hiding "pizzagate" but not Podesta.

Pizzagate is a highly controversial topic which spread like wildfire over the internet, it's linked to pizza, which kids can search... and it could make people uncomfortable reading about these things, and with no specific investigation by authorities announced about this (to my knowledge) trying to keep something as horrific as pizzagate is out of the reach of their younger userbase is understandable in my personal opinion.

However, it was immediately dismissed as fake news rather quickly, but I can understand twitters side of business not being wanted to be attached to that particular topic.

Not that I endorse them censoring anything, but in this particular case I can understand why they'd want to avoid that subject, however it seems they'll censor anything they don't agree with, which is a problem I think.