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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So, uh, the latest Twitter Files just dropped. This one is about Trump and his removal.

Taibbi claims the following.

  1. Twitter post-Trump-ban was now willing to carry forward a policy of "the president can be banned" no matter what.

  2. At least 1 executive did not consider Trump's tweets in isolation i.e they considered the context surrounding the man, his policies, and supporters as well, and they were discussing this with Gadde.

  3. Trust and Safety team members were meeting with the FBI and DHS regularly during this time period.

  4. Twitter was actively engaging in fact-checking against some class of tweets (the particular example is whether Trump's claim about a rigged election would count as a violation if the supporting facts were wrong).

  5. Twitter was aware that they would not necessarily look good if it came out that they were partnering with the FBI/DHS to evaluate misinformation.

In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias. Nothing new was revealed, which is now an argument many are using to claim that this is all a waste of time.

I'm totally down to believe that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi had to post their reveals on Twitter, but the theatrical nature of the reveals is, in my opinion, actively hurting whatever points they want to make. The discussions are increasingly becoming about how the information is being handled over what, if anything, is being shown to us.

I subscribe to the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times. I've noticed that for two weeks in a row there has been no story on The Twitter Files. There is one story online.

Some stories printed in the A section this week that made the cut (headlines my own): Joe Biden supported gay marriage ten years ago (front page); some Americans still working in Russia (also front page); Santa Claus visits a native village in Alaska; rural voters less likely to approve of Biden's climate efforts.

this isn't news to some because they knew or assumed cynically. this isn't news to others because they don't care or supported it. i doubt those of either lean who find this surprising(newsworthy) come here.

social media giant meeting with letters agencies and also quieting political opposition. . . to downplay this is, from naivety, ignorance. else bad faith. the former is what gives weight to the latter. that rhetoric has not been on simple just action--we did what we must and would again--and instead is talking about talking about it says enough.

i do not hold to free speech because i have such certainty that all speech is permissible. truly, there may be things that shouldn't be talked about. i hold to it for the simple philosophy that seems commonly forgotten. none can be trusted to make the decision. so this affair only bothers me because i have seen exactly how contemptibly foolish yoel roth & co were as they wielded such control over what i could read. they were not worthy. of course, none are.

In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias. Nothing new was revealed, which is now an argument many are using to claim that this is all a waste of time.

Yeah does seem weak. Of course the FBI looked into it . The FBI looks into anything of national interest, and Jan 6 certainly is.

I'm totally down to believe that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi had to post their reveals on Twitter, but the theatrical nature of the reveals is, in my opinion, actively hurting whatever points they want to make.

Good for their brands. More $, more subs. I think it shows how banal it all is. This great machiavellian conspiracy is just some functionaries who could not be less enthusiastic about the jobs they have been tasked with.

Yeah does seem weak. Of course the FBI looked into it . The FBI looks into anything of national interest, and Jan 6 certainly is.

Twitter "Trust and Safety" was meeting with the FBI not just after January 6, but before the election.

a presidential election is of national interest too. It looked like the FBI was investigating possible voter fraud or something amiss. they are understandably vigilant about this sort of thing. There was a 2016 campaign on twitter regarding fake dates https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charged-election-interference-stemming-voter-disinformation-campaign

The FBI is not, in fact, the Department of Misinformation. They have no valid role in preventing people from making the modern equivalent of the hoary old joke about "due to unexpectedly high turnout, Party A votes on Tuesday, Party B votes on Wednesday", nor prosecuting them for making it. And I doubt that's all they were up to; in fact we know it was not because they were giving false tips about Russian disinformation ops as well.

That is treason, Johnny!

Using an avenue of interstate commerce to commit fraud is indeed a federal crime, as is conspiring to deprive citizens of the right to vote through the use of deception

This is an obvious fig leaf for attempting to control political discourse.

Attempting to trick people into not casting a valid vote is not "political discourse" any more than physically intimidating voters is political discourse, Do you maintain that the FBI has no valid role in preventing that? Whether what the FBI did in this case was an attempt to control political discourse is a different question than whether the FBI can legitimately seek to prevent this sort of election fraud in principle. Your claim that the answer to the latter question is "no", given that the activity in question is illegal, makes no sense. "This law enforcement agency has no valid role in enforcing the law that they are charged with enforcing" is a nonsensical claim.

Attempting to trick people into not casting a valid vote is not "political discourse" any more than physically intimidating voters is political discourse

These are two entirely different things. The FBI has no valid role in preventing the former, perhaps unless those attempting to do so are falsely representing themselves as government officials. Just talking shit like "hey, you can vote for CandidateThatSucks by text" is still protected by the First Amendment; physically intimidating voters is not.

And this was certainly not all the FBI was doing.

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Damn, better not tell any jokes on your private farm, where you only grow crops for your own consumption. You never know who might be listening.

You seem to be arguing that a law which seeks to prevent someone from depriving others of the right to vote in federal elections is somehow no more proper than is a law which limits growing crops for your own consumption, which is a claim whose legitimacy is less than self-evident. Regardless, whether a law is or is not sound policy is irrelevant to whether a law enforcement agency has a "valid role" in enforcing that law. OP's claim to the contrary was, to quote Justice Thomas in another context, "uncommonly silly."

No, you misunderstood. I'm saying that since growing your own crops, for on your own farm, strictly for your own private consumption is interstate commerce, according to you, telling someone an obvious joke while on your farm is also "using an avenue of interstate commerce to commit fraud" and "conspiring to deprive citizens of the right to vote".

More comments

The discussions are increasingly becoming about how the information is being handled over what, if anything, is being shown to us.

So you don't like how it is being handled or that everyone is talking about how it is being handled?

It's actually a pretty common political strategy. They don't want to talk about the actual topic, because it makes them look bad, so they claim everyone already knew that and change the subject to discuss the discussion. Then not only can they pretend to be above it or bored, but they can even lament the state of things and complain about the loss of focus - giving them outs that don't require any status loss.

I don't like how it's being handled because I think doing this on Twitter means authors can't expound as much as I'd like. No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post. But I also dislike how people keep using the "it's just right-wing theater" argument. I understand that for some people, there's fundamentally nothing wrong with Twitter choosing what to remove or who to ban upon nothing but their own thoughts. But I don't like the theater argument being used as some kind of substitute for actually defending this idea. Mind you, if a person is choosing to attack the Twitter Files by claiming it was theater, I wouldn't mind that argument there, because now it's an argument about motivations.

No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post.

I keep hearing things like this, but it's never actually explained or defended. What, exactly, is so onerous about reading tweet threads compared to articles? Is there a mobile device limitation I'm unaware of as a prolific desktop user? Just... scroll down as you read? I'm eternally baffled by this complaint.

My main complaint is that it slows my reading speed to a crawl. I think partly because space is used inefficiently, and it also just makes it slower/harder to parse text when you dont have paragraph structure.

The entire point of a tweet is to be small and catchy (hence the character limit which has itself been doubled from 140 to 280). There's a reason most news publishers don't wholly publish on Twitter even if their article is free - quoting a catchy portion or the title and then linking to the article seems like more intuitive.

There are definitely people who would read 80-tweet chains, but the audience for that consists of people who just like reading long-form content (people like us for the most part). A lot of media and people are turned off by having to commit a lot of time to doing something (observe the increasing trend towards short-form content when it comes to watching online videos - TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc.)

Is that not a fully general argument against articles, too? I don't get the impression people are complaining about tweet threads because they're long; they're complaining about tweet threads because they're tweet threads, for some reason.

My frustration with tweet threads is that they're fundamentally a hack around the character limit. People want to be able to say longer things, but they can't, so they make tweet threads. But this is precisely what tweets are not meant to be used for, each one is supposed to be stand-alone. Twitter revolves around and conditions people to make shorter posts, which is why I say that people on Twitter are less likely to read an N-tweet thread even if there is an equivalent amount of text in an article. The medium conditions your attention span.

An article would be more succinct. A tweet storm has the obvious benefit of being more viral.

I don't see how an article would be more succinct. Tweet threads are basically just articles split up into chunks 280 characters long, rounded down to the nearest sentence.

an article allows you to list the most important things first. Instead of having to read 10-100+ 200-word tweets having to decide what is the most important item (assuming you do not give up), with an article you can explicitly say what it is, with evidence.

Err, Twitter threads can list the important things first. They're just... words. You can choose to put first the words that are most important.

No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post.

I'm not sure about that.

I've read multiple.

In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias.

Huh? Maybe in the "it's not happening, and if it is, it's a good thing" sense. Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true). Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?

Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?

But we already knew that? I mean just publicly, we knew that Twitter was taking a stance against "misinformation" and trying to add corrections to people's tweets. Mind you, I don't think the exact specifics were known to the public, but I also don't consider "news flash, Twitter has active infrastructure and action to combat what they don't want" to be something particularly revealing.

Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true).

It's Wikipedia on a topic that is now salient to politics, did you expect that the people editing it were more interested in substance over ideology?

Secondly, the shadow-banning thing is an annoying conversation by virtue of being over definition. My understanding of shadow-banning is that no one can see the content in question, though the user would never know this without logging out and checking for their content. This is how Reddit does it, from my understanding, and how a lot of people are thinking about this topic.

However, I don't agree with this and think we should amend the definition based on how Twitter operates. If a celebrity starts noticing their tweets get no engagement, they'd realize it immediately as something being off because there's a direct link between followers in a way that doesn't exist on Reddit. So if Twitter makes it so that only followers see that content, then we should say this person is shadow-banned. However, there's a caveat to this in that technically, the content wasn't hidden, just maximally deboosted, meaning even the amended definition wouldn't fit. I think that's a small and irrelevant point to quibble over, personally.

If I have any problem with how people are doing this debate more publicly, it would be that definitions aren't being tabooed.

But we already knew that? I mean just publicly, we knew that Twitter was taking a stance against "misinformation" and trying to add corrections to people's tweets. Mind you, I don't think the exact specifics were known to the public, but I also don't consider "news flash, Twitter has active infrastructure and action to combat what they don't want" to be something particularly revealing.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign. Like, I'm supposed to be outraged at Cambridge Analytica, or that the Russians spent their pocket money on a handful of Facebook ads, but shrug it off when Twitter is actively limiting the reach of politicians they don't like?

It's Wikipedia on a topic that is now salient to politics, did you expect that the people editing it were more interested in substance over ideology?

I didn't, but as they say, "we live in a society". I can't pretend there isn't a huge amount of people who think Wikipedia is neutral.

However, there's a caveat to this in that technically, the content wasn't hidden, just maximally deboosted, meaning even the amended definition wouldn't fit. I think that's a small and irrelevant point to quibble over, personally.

I mean, that's just how people were using the word "shadow banned" all the time. Check sodiummuffins link for an example.

If I have any problem with how people are doing this debate more publicly, it would be that definitions aren't being tabooed.

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals. They'll just find a way to abuse tabooing definitions to score political points.

I think there was an implicit assumption there, they're filtering Twitter randos, not democratically elected politician during an election campaign.

That would be a false assumption then because we knew since 2020 that Twitter was willing to publicly declare some politicians' tweets to be "misinformation".

Tabooing definitions might be a good idea when there's a true misunderstanding between people who actually want to understand each other. It's not going to work in a fight between political rivals.

This is true but trivial. I think there are many people who might be fundamentally missing the point by focusing on the trivial nature of what term is used to describe the action.

I disagree, the point is to make the post much less visible, not to remove it entirely. Many shadowban implementations, and I think even reddit, allows shadow banned content to be seen if directly linked to. They did the important thing regarding shadow banning, kill someone's/a meme's ability to go viral the way they/it naturally would have if not intervened on. Twitter isn't used as a private hosting platform, it's used a means to virally disseminate information. It is a totally useless tool if that ability is cut off.

Many shadowban implementations, and I think even reddit, allows shadow banned content to be seen if directly linked to.

But how would you even do that? You'd have to have separate accounts, at which point you're ban-evading, or you're just doing more work than necessary.

Among other things, a purpose for that particular implementation is so that past links -- written or noticed or indexed before the account was shadow-banned -- still work. Reddit also allowed mods to manually approve their messages, although it's not clear whether this was 'allowed' only in a technical sense rather than a norm one.

What's your definition of "shadow-ban"?

According to urbandictionary

Banning a user from a web forum in such a way that the banned user is unaware of the ban. Usually takes the form of showing that user's posts/profile/etc. only to that user; other users never see them. Considered underhanded chicken-shit behavior.

And according to Twitter

People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, “what is shadow banning?”

The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.

So, what accounts is it alleged Twitter shadow banned, according to either its own or the pre-Twitter-Files definition? As far as I can tell the actions Twitter is alleged to have taken are:

  1. De-boosted some accounts such that their content would not appear in one's timeline, but could still be viewed if they went to the posting account directly (i.e. not shadow banned) and;

  2. Hid some accounts from auto complete in the search bar, but which could still be viewed if one navigated directly to the posting account (i.e. not shadow banning).

As far as I can tell this new post-Twitter-Files definition of shadow banning as any kind of limit of an accounts reach is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming Twitter lied about not shadow banning people (in the same blog post where they are extremely clear about what they mean by shadow banning).

The term "shadowban" was invented in the context of phpbb-style single-thread forums, which were usually fairly low-traffic. The visibility of the specific post in a specific thread is very binary there - either you see it in the correct position, or you don't. So Shadowbanning there is a simple concept with a specific meaning.

Twitter works very differently in that it's theoretically a flat system and every tweet by every user is at the same level. Time is the only natural thing to filter by, but even that doesn't really work that well - if you follow 10 people, you probably don't really want the one that tweets once a day to be effectively invisible due to being drowned out by the one who tweets every 10 minutes. There always has to be some sort of algorithm in place to determine which order tweets show up in. A strict "shadowban" meaning your tweets never show up outside of viewing your timeline would be easy, but also very obvious. But when you have an unknown and unaccountable algorithm deciding whose tweets are seen when by who, it's equally easy to make any tweet show up less or lower for any reason you feel like. If your tweet gets 10% of the engagement you would have expected, well who's to say whether it just wasn't a very good tweet, or it was artificially deboosted?

Shadowban is a popular term for the concept, but the literal meaning isn't very useful when it comes to representing how Twitter actually works. It seems like a motte and bailey situation. One side could say Twitter doesn't shadowban because they never actually do the exact literal meaning. The other side can say that artificially suppressing the reach of a tweet in more subtle ways may technically not be the literal meaning, but it's the same idea, and they need a word to express it that is understandable and has some punch to it.

This is completely false, shadowbanning has been for used for many years to refer to any kind of ban or hiding of someone's posts that is hidden from the shadowbanned user even if they are still possible to access to some degree. The website everyone used to check if they were shadowbanned on Twitter was shadowban.eu, which specifically checked for "Search Suggestion Ban", "Search Ban", "Ghost Ban", "Reply Deboosting" and (until it was deprecated) "Quality Filter Discrimination". Today other websites like this one also use the term shadowban for the same methods.

Nobody tweeting about how they were shadowbanned was claiming that their tweets were completely invisible - obviously so, since there would be no point in tweeting about it and everyone would have already noticed. Reddit-style complete shadowbans are trivial to see by just looking at your own posts with an incognito window or TOR, and on Twitter would be immediately noticed for anyone with followers, making them a much less effective form of shadowbanning. Reddit's shadowban system was originally designed for use against spambots, while Twitter's was designed for use against humans.

EDIT: Also this is the opening of the Wikipedia article which calls Twitter shadowbanning a conspiracy theory:

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.

By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will be discouraged to continue their unwanted behavior or create new accounts

The "less prominent" part has been in the article since 2017, since before the "conspiracy theory" part.

I appreciate the links! It seems more people did refer to Twitter's actions as "shadow-banning" than I was aware of, even if Twitter itself did not.

What's your definition of "shadow-ban"?

The second one you quoted is fine, with the caveat that it doesn't have to be undiscoverable to everyone.

As far as I can tell this new post-Twitter-Files definition of shadow banning as any kind of limit of an accounts reach is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming Twitter lied about not shadow banning people (in the same blog post where they are extremely clear about what they mean by shadow banning).

And as far as I can tell, insisting that to meet the definition of "shadow-banning" content has to be made 100% undiscoverable is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming twitter hasn't lied about shadow banning people.

I agree. Twitter does shadowban and has lied about it. They have multiple degrees of shadow banning, but it exists. They are not going to say they do, but it has the same outcome.

I think this is just a new halfway measure that didn't have a specific term. Would anyone be unhappy with calling this as "partial shadowban" or something like that?

I disagree. I've been around the web for a middling long time. Been banned and shadow banned and so on... rather often in my teenage years. I still kept getting banned well into my thirties.

Honestly I forgot how many times I got permabanned from somewhere. I mean, when you find out you can make dignified, reasonable Americans absolutely lose their temper and go ape by posting at them about 13/50, twin studies and race and IQ, it gets rather tempting to do so. (the psychological reasons why I did so are rather clear in hindsight)

Got several months-long bans on SSC and motte. So, I have extensive experience with being on the wrong end of moderation.

A shadow ban is that you and only you can see what you post. This has been, unless my memory is fake, the understood definition for at least a decade if not more.

If you're logged out you can't see what you post.

It's relatively trivial to spot - you get zero interaction, you log into Tor and you can't see yourself.

You could do a search and this is what would come up. Reddit does it to content it doesn't like. I've ran into it numerous times while posting on the old motte about Reddit policy team being composed of very spooky people.

So, technically, twitter isn't shadow banning.

Perhaps we could use the term 'throttling' here?

In practice, having all your responses being hidden under "more replies", having a search suggestion ban means, that only people who follow you or who are very thorough will see your content or replies.

It's not as strong as a shadow ban, but it definitely limits your reach and influence. It is Twitter putting its thumb on the scale under the banner of 'fighting hate'.

It was also something most right wing accounts I followed were subject to. People like Nick Land, 0hp Lovecraft (still has a search suggestion ban), Steve Sailer etc.

Unless you followed them, you'd have a hard time seeing their activity.

Honestly I forgot how many times I got permabanned from somewhere. I mean, when you find out you can make dignified, reasonable Americans absolutely lose their temper and go ape by posting at them about 13/50, twin studies and race and IQ, it gets rather tempting to do so. (the psychological reasons why I did so are rather clear in hindsight)

Very easy to be banned on reddit subs. Not even race/HBD stuff. Just ideological disagreement.

True, however, in my twenties I often got banned for simply just being too spicy or just too unhinged. I'm not the world's most reasonable person once I get going, and especially if caffeine and alcohol are involved.

I generally avoid combining the two, as it's very likely I come up with what they call a 'powerful take' and if you do that on a US libertarian forum, you're out.

E.g. that "ackshually, some amount of misogyny is good because a healthy dose of it counteracts the women-are-wonderful effect and thus cuts down on harmful, manipulative behavior of women, thus enhancing societal health".

See my post above, more subtle forms of shadowbanning like Twitter uses have been called "shadowbans" for many years. Including by the shadowban.eu site that everyone used to check.

It was also something most right wing accounts I followed were subject to. People like Nick Land, 0hp Lovecraft (still has a search suggestion ban), Steve Sailer etc.

I did a search and all 3 of those accounts used the term "shadowban" that way years ago:

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/934264497639899136

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1184531291741577217

https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1588375202953854976

https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1192976470802460673

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1311276706553094146

People on Twitter talking about shadowbanning were referring to the Twitter form of shadowbanning, not the too-obvious Reddit method.

Twitter has something like 5 levels of shadowbaning. The worst is being totally ghosted on the site. Or having all your comments be hidden in 'show more' , or search result ban. Most people who think they are shadowbanned are not , but rather think they are because their tweets seem to be getting less engagement. but this can be due to many reasons, such as posting links or hashtags or embedded tweets instead of text/pictures, which do the best. Tweets with links are throttled compared to plain text, video, or pictures.

I agree. However:

But that's the linguistic ambiguity the censorious are exploiting. We should perhaps rectify it ?

I don't understand how the requirement to be undiscoverable to "everyone" is being invented. The word "everyone" is right there in the definition Twitter gave of what it considered shadow banning back in 2018. Now, maybe your own definition has never had "everyone" as a requirement, but Twitter seems to have clearly communicated that their definition included "everyone" and so, on their own understanding of the term "shadow-banning", did not "shadow-ban" anyone.

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