Algorithmed Out: Twitter admits to shadow banning on behalf of Ol' Hill.

by Angela K. Durden
Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Citizen Journalist.

In 2016 and 2017, I called out Twitter on their shadow banning. As a Citizen Journalist writing on the subject of protections given citizens by the Constitution, and how those are being destroyed by Tech Giants, and The Majors and The Bigs of entertainment, I was and still am regularly "algorithmed out" of information sharing.

I cried foul and was told by many I was either being a whiny-butt, paranoid, or thought more of myself than it was necessary to think because why would Twitter target little ol' me?

Many say, "Twitter is a private company and can do as they wish." True. They are private.

But when they control the flow of information, they have a higher duty to users. 

If they want to algorithm out users posts, they should tell users each and every time they do. Then users can say, "Okay. I'll take my messaging elsewhere." Then when their user base — and by user base I mean eyeballs they can show ads to — dries up, let them come back begging.

Reported in Lawnewz.com, Twitter's general counsel admitted to shadow banning on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign by regularly not sharing tweets with certain hashtags. Quoted from Twitter General Counsel Edgett's prepared testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism delivered on October 31:

In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the 7 #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.

Screen snip from Lawnewz.com

Twitter's testimony is self-serving.

They say they are so patriotic they fought foreign actors who wanted to meddle in US elections, and oh, by the way, their algorithm can't tell the difference between automation and real people.

Does Twitter take the same view about their tweeters as generals do about the enemy? You know, kill them all and let God sort it out. Sure seems so.