I have been fully Shadow Banned on Twitter! I found out by contacting a friend and asking them to view a Twitter thread that I believed I had been replying to. My own Twitter feed showed all of my replies but the friend could not find any of them on the thread.
You know you are being shadow banned when no-one replies, retweets or likes you on Twitter any more. That is not because they don't like you, its because they never see your replies. You can also be partially shadow banned with your replies tucked away beneath "more replies" boxes or only available if you click on the tweet to which the reply applied (de-threading). De-threading prevents people who are looking at the main thread from seeing your tweet.
It is quite possible that Twitter is tightening up its shadow banning operation as the UK gets nearer to a vote on Brexit. All broadcast media have mounted a frenetic anti-no-deal propaganda drive and no doubt other forms of media are following on.
I have just found out that other people who support Brexit have recently found themselves lacking comments and "likes" in Twitter, with a sudden downturn over the past few days. Twitter is definitely campaigning for Remain by turning up the strength of their shadow banning algorithms.
Twitter itself says it does not shadow ban although it is clear from their protestation of innocence that their ranking systems are a form of shadow banning. Twitter's point seems to really be that their shadow banning is always justifiable on grounds other than political bias.
Reading through Twitter's justification for shadow banning it seems the rules are strongly opposed to people tweeting views that disagree with the views expressed on a thread. This behaviour will not result in likes and may lead to muting by participants in the thread, both of which will downgrade the Twitter user and so will effectively shadow ban them across all of Twitter.
Twitter is not really a suitable platform for political debate because its rules, if followed by participants, result in polarisation into groups of individuals who all like each other's tweets and never mute each other. Twitter permits political content but does not really want to host political debate.
It is possible that some groups of political activists have worked out how to aggressively game Twitter's rules by creating large threads with lots of their own participants and then progressively muting opponents who join. Looking back over my tweeting history it may have been involvement in such a thread that got me fully shadow banned. If you want to campaign on Twitter beware of threads with a suspiciously large number of participants, they may be traps of this sort.
Update: I am now back to a half ban. How strange...
What should Twitter do?
Being banned is one thing but being "shadow" banned is altogether a different level of slyness. Twitter should warn users that they are being downgraded. This might be done with an indicator panel in their profile that has their downgrade score. This would convert "shadow" banning into simple banning.
There might also be a political section in profiles that has options such as "this ID is being used for political debate" and "allow strong banning of political content". Strong banning would involve the same level of banning as, say, an aggressive campaign for a commercial product might experience.
The two options would operate as follows. If an ID was declared to be political it would only experience a weak level of banning so that political debate could occur. If a general user really did not want to be bothered by politics they would tick the "allow strong banning of political content" so that the number of political tweets that they received would be minimised as it would for unwanted commercial content. The two options would be mutually exclusive so that political IDs could not opt out of political debate.
You know you are being shadow banned when no-one replies, retweets or likes you on Twitter any more. That is not because they don't like you, its because they never see your replies. You can also be partially shadow banned with your replies tucked away beneath "more replies" boxes or only available if you click on the tweet to which the reply applied (de-threading). De-threading prevents people who are looking at the main thread from seeing your tweet.
It is quite possible that Twitter is tightening up its shadow banning operation as the UK gets nearer to a vote on Brexit. All broadcast media have mounted a frenetic anti-no-deal propaganda drive and no doubt other forms of media are following on.
I have just found out that other people who support Brexit have recently found themselves lacking comments and "likes" in Twitter, with a sudden downturn over the past few days. Twitter is definitely campaigning for Remain by turning up the strength of their shadow banning algorithms.
Twitter itself says it does not shadow ban although it is clear from their protestation of innocence that their ranking systems are a form of shadow banning. Twitter's point seems to really be that their shadow banning is always justifiable on grounds other than political bias.
Reading through Twitter's justification for shadow banning it seems the rules are strongly opposed to people tweeting views that disagree with the views expressed on a thread. This behaviour will not result in likes and may lead to muting by participants in the thread, both of which will downgrade the Twitter user and so will effectively shadow ban them across all of Twitter.
Twitter is not really a suitable platform for political debate because its rules, if followed by participants, result in polarisation into groups of individuals who all like each other's tweets and never mute each other. Twitter permits political content but does not really want to host political debate.
It is possible that some groups of political activists have worked out how to aggressively game Twitter's rules by creating large threads with lots of their own participants and then progressively muting opponents who join. Looking back over my tweeting history it may have been involvement in such a thread that got me fully shadow banned. If you want to campaign on Twitter beware of threads with a suspiciously large number of participants, they may be traps of this sort.
Update: I am now back to a half ban. How strange...
What should Twitter do?
Being banned is one thing but being "shadow" banned is altogether a different level of slyness. Twitter should warn users that they are being downgraded. This might be done with an indicator panel in their profile that has their downgrade score. This would convert "shadow" banning into simple banning.
There might also be a political section in profiles that has options such as "this ID is being used for political debate" and "allow strong banning of political content". Strong banning would involve the same level of banning as, say, an aggressive campaign for a commercial product might experience.
The two options would operate as follows. If an ID was declared to be political it would only experience a weak level of banning so that political debate could occur. If a general user really did not want to be bothered by politics they would tick the "allow strong banning of political content" so that the number of political tweets that they received would be minimised as it would for unwanted commercial content. The two options would be mutually exclusive so that political IDs could not opt out of political debate.
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