And have the “Twitter Files” proved a right-wing conspiracy about it?
BY NITISH PAHWA
DEC 10, 202211:27 AM
Stefano Pollio/Unsplash
Depending on whom you ask, the “Twitter Files” have been either a total flop or a vindication. Nowhere is that more true than in the debate over “shadow banning.”
Right-wingers have long alleged that Twitter (and other social media) suppresses conservative voices and runs interference for the libs. So now, Elon Musk, in his new capacity as Chief Twit, is granting internal peeks at network systems and communications to prominent right-leaning writers in his personal circle. As such, Substack stars Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been tweeting out screenshots that demonstrate how the bird app became a liberal propaganda arm in collusion with the Democratic Party.
Except, not really. Taibbi’s first and second Twitter Files drops mainly clarified that the company had time and again followed its own rules: in halting the spread of Hunter Biden revenge porn, and in taking the prospect of banning politicians’ dangerous rhetoric rather seriously. Bari Weiss’ Thursday evening “report,” meanwhile, claimed to validate a long-held conservative belief: that right wingers were being “shadow banned.” Taibbi promises even more shocking Twitter shadow-banning revelations to come.
But what, really, is “shadow banning”? And have the Twitter Files actually proved conservatives right all along?
If you, like me, were a Redditor during the early 2010s, you likely remember drama about “shadowbanning” (as one word) within various subreddits; on those forums, a word that started as a brief, throwaway Something Awful joke became a manner of serious import. As the Verge defined it 10 years ago, shadowbanning on Reddit entailed “an admin-enforced measure which lets the user post and browse the site normally but hides them from other users.” Basically, a shadowbanned Reddit account could use the site as normal, commenting where they please, but other Redditors wouldn’t see those comments for, usually, a few days at a time. The directive for this came from employed administrators at the top of the Reddit chain; individual subreddit moderators could not deploy such a measure (and could, in fact, get shadowbanned themselves). Most often, shadowbans were deployed to deal with spammers, but their use was later expanded to discipline Redditors who broke other important sitewide rules.
All this naturally became controversial, as it became difficult to tell whether or why someone may have been shadowbanned, and to figure out how to appeal the restriction. It often could appear as though admins were doling out such bans incorrectly or arbitrarily, to the detriment of the Reddit experience. And the prospect of being shadowbanned without notice was unsettling. If a Redditor’s posts weren’t getting voted up or down, they couldn’t tell whether their comments were simply boring or not appearing for others. By late 2015, there was enough frustration across the forums that Reddit did away with shadowbanning altogether, opting to punish misbehaving users through account suspensions instead.
The term experienced a resurgence just a couple of years later, when Twitter users began alleging that it was happening there. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that the company was “throttling” the reach of accounts that had engaged in abusive behavior. Other outlets began to call that shadowbanning—even though 1) limiting an account’s reach was quite different from making sure no one could see it at all, and 2) the affected tweeters were notified by the platform.
The following year, a Vice article claimed that Twitter was shadowbanning famous Republicans like Donald Trump Jr. by preventing their account names from autopopulating within the website’s search bar. This also was not a shadowban as it had been known in previous times: The Republican accounts themselves still appeared in Twitter search results, and it turned out the search-population measure was deployed in a manner that affected leftist accounts as well. Still, the controversy was pronounced enough that Twitter’s official account shared a blog post about how it did not, in fact, engage in shadowbanning (and the company later removed the offending search code). In the blog, two former Twitter executives reference “the best definition” of shadowbanning they could find, which was: “deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.”
