Twitter Is Limiting the Visibility of Prominent Republicans In Search Results (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Twitter is limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans in search results -- a technique known as "shadow banning" -- in what it says is a side effect of its attempts to improve the quality of discourse on the platform. The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It's a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform -- and it's the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search, but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.)

Democrats are not being "shadow banned" in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel's counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress -- including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan -- all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter's search. Presented with screenshots of the searches, a Twitter spokesperson told VICE News: "We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this." Asked why only conservative Republicans appear to be affected and not liberal Democrats, the spokesperson wrote: "I'd emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets."

Comments

Re:It's not the content, it's how you say it

[Mashiki]

So, can you explain why this has happened to Judicial Watch then? The only thing "inflammatory and lower the discourse" is that they bring forth embarrassing or criminal acts by the legal system or those in charge of it.

Re:It's not the content, it's how you say it

[quantaman]

I'm sure they already know this, but the algorithm isn't designed to trip up GOP politicians. It says a lot more about how they choose to phrase their message and talk about issues, than any agenda seeking to silence them on Twitter.

When what you post is designed to be inflammatory and lower discourse and a system designed to combat that properly flags it, maybe its working as intended and you should look inwards? No matter where you stand, there are good and bad ways to engage in discourse. On all topics, with all points of view.

That was my first thought but her account didn't really seem that bad.

I suspect the problem is that prominent racists try to avoid saying things that are obviously racist, so there's a lot of subtext and "draw the obvious conclusion" posts that are so hard for an algorithm to reliably flag as racist that you might as well not bother.

So how do you find those prominent racists to shadow ban? Well the trick is that there's a bunch of other racists who are so guarded in their language and are really easy for an algorithm to flag as racist.

So you steal a page from PageRank and realize that if a whole bunch of obvious racists are constantly retweeting someone in a positive context then you've probably found a prominent racist.

The problem that happened here is that White Supremacists really like Trump and the job of the GOP Chairwoman is to promote and defend Trump.

So all of her pro-Trump tweets are now getting retweeted by obvious White Supremacists and indicating to Twitter that she's some prominent White Supremacist, hence the shadow-ban.

Re:Dog Whistling

[AmiMoJo]

Give us a specific example of Obama being racially divisive. An actual quote and a citation of where it comes from.