Many people have suspected that Twitter has been “shadowbanning” the right on its service, and in order to dispel the rumors, they put out a statement denying it.
And then admitted they were shadowbanning.
Here’s their blog post about the subject:
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.
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.
Notice that one line I emphasized – you might have to do extra work to read some people’s tweets. That sounds a hell of a lot like shadowbanning, which is a subtle practice to change the conversation on social media.
Also, their stock has plummeted by 17%….