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#TwitterGate Update: Shadowbanning Is Real, and Vijaya Gadde Lied About It

Posted on | December 10, 2022 | 1 Comment

Vijaya Gadde became a multimillionaire working for Twitter, and apparently part of her job — why she got paid the big bucks — was to conceal the facts about how Twitter employees were manipulating their platform to suppress facts and opinions that Twitter employees didn’t like. Evita Duffy recounts at Twitter:

Remember all the times Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde assured us that Twitter neither shadowbans nor targets conservatives? Well, they lied.
In the second installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” independent journalist Bari Weiss exposed how the Big Tech company was secretly “blacklisting” conservative tweets and users by keeping “disfavored” tweets from trending and secretly hiding whole accounts or topics without users’ knowledge. . . .
On July 25, 2018, Vice News reported that several prominent Republican politicians, such as Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, did not show up in a drop-down menu of automatically suggested searches, even when typing in the politicians’ names.
A day after the outcry over the apparent shadowbanning, Gadde and Twitter’s product head Kayvon Beykpour attempted to couch concerns by co-authoring a blog post titled “Setting the record straight on shadow banning.” “We do not shadow ban,” Gadde and Beykpour insisted. “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.”
The day before publishing that blog post, Beykpour posted a Twitter thread blaming the discrimination against Republican members of Congress on the company’s use of “behavioral signals and machine learning,” which they were working to “improve.” However, Beykpour assured users that “our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets.”
Dorsey then shared Gadde and Beykpour’s blog post, writing, “We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints.”
“We want a vibrant and healthy public conversation inclusive of all perspectives, and one that’s immediately relevant and valuable,” added Dorsey.

As Bari Weiss’s thread makes clear, these denials were the direct opposite of truth. It wasn’t some “machine learning” algorithm that was controlling content on Twitter. Internal documents show that top Twitter executives discussed specific decisions on “visibility limitation” tools. They played favorites, boosting some accounts and suppressing others.

The revelations keep coming, and on Friday, Matt Taibbi began telling the story of the lead-up to Twitter’s fateful decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform. Why? Because of “election misinformation”? But as Taibbi clearly demonstrates, Twitter bosses were picking and choosing what (and who) to suppress on that subject:

Did I mention that Twitter executives were at times acting on orders from the FBI in deciding whose election-related content got flagged? Because that seems kind of important, doesn’t it?

To summarize the situation as succinctly as possible, everything that they labeled a “conspiracy theory” turns out to be 100% true, and all their denials and explanations turn out to be 100% false.

At some point, we’re going to need an in-depth inquiry to answer a couple of questions: First, how is it that Silicon Valley, once a stronghold of freedom-loving libertarianism, turned into a hive of “woke” SJW Thought Police? And second, when did the FBI become an apparatus of the Democratic Party? Things have gone badly wrong in the past few years, and there must be some coherent explanation for these developments.



 

Category: Crime, Election, Scandal

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One Response to “#TwitterGate Update: Shadowbanning Is Real, and Vijaya Gadde Lied About It”

  1. The Twitter Files keep exposing the scoundrels - The DaleyGator
    December 10th, 2022 @ 2:51 pm

    […] Scoundrels meaning people who set themselves up as censors, and also lied about it. The Other McCain has the story […]