Rogan mentions “shadow banning”. What does shadow ban mean, exactly? Your posts aren’t visible to followers, is that it? Or is it that they are throttling how likely your tweets will show up in timelines of people who aren’t following you. Twitter’s dependence on opaque, AI-driven algorithms to decide what people can see makes this whole thing very murky to me. Is it “free speech” if some AI is deciding how visible your content is based on number of follows, retweets, and various other variables that are “content agnostic” — even when the algorithms end up being biased towards certain types of content?
From Musk's recent TED interview: "If in doubt, let the speech exist," Musk said at the TED conference. "If it's a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously in the case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet." Can someone explain how what he said there is different from the concept of "shadow banning"?
would it be like if you are posting on a thread but nobody can see that you posted anything except you because you have been shadow banned
This is what I'm not understanding about Twitter. Al the posts people make in this BBS thread will be equally visible to everyone, in the order in which they are made. Is that how Twitter works as well by default, or are certain tweets made more visible than others (i.e., promoted) based on some AI?
good question i don't use twitter, i just repost the news off it when i feel the headline doesn't need a youtube video
Specific instances when a tweet's reach may be limited (twitter.com) Some information from Twitter on its "shadow ban" policy: 2. Proactive detection of Tweets Even if behavior isn’t reported, we use our technology to identify accounts that are engaging in what may be abusive or spammy behavior. When this happens, we take action by limiting certain account functionality, such as only distributing their Tweets to their followers. For example, this enforcement could come into effect if an account is repeatedly unsolicitedly Tweeting at non-followers or engaging in patterns of abusive behavior. It may also come into effect for spammy behavior such as aggressive following or other unusual behavior identified in the Twitter Rules. This is also relevant, relating to how Twitter promotes or demotes tweets based on AI-driven algorithms: 4. Quality and safety ranking We are constantly working on improving core parts of the Twitter experience, including Home timeline, conversations, and search so that people see content that they are most interested in and contributes to the conversation in a meaningful way, such as content that is relevant, credible, and safe. We have also developed "safe search" functionality which removes Tweets that contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. As part of this, our team has been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward. These Tweet replies are still accessible to those who seek them out. We use a variety of behavior-based signals to inform how we rank content, such as who you follow, what conversations you join, and if someone is muted or blocked and by whom. For example, if you Tweet to a number of accounts and they block or mute you, we have a strong signal that those accounts do not want to see your Tweets. Or, if everyone responds when you mention them in a Tweet that demonstrates to us that they want to join the conversation. No one signal is used in isolation – the system uses many signals to continually determine how each account should be ranked. It seems to me that people who are most extremely ideological are also most likely to engage in aggressive, abusive behavior that could be flagged by Twitter's algorithms and trigger this "shadow ban". I would not be surprised if the way Twitter has trained its algorithms to find such abusive content has an "implicit bias" against conservatives.
If you were to go to a topic or # and sort it by date, sure...but the trending section is about popularity and promoted by an 'algorithm' You also have your own trending section which tries to lead you to subjects that twitter thinks might interest you, in this case, the NBA and Rockets... Shadowbanning is when your posts are banned but others can't see them and so they are deprioritized.
