Posted on 01/13/2018 7:43:29 AM PST by Louis Foxwell
Undercover Videos Expose Twitter’s Dirty Secrets "So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?" January 12, 2018 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
How do you know you’ve been shadowbanned? You may be tweeting, but you’re no longer being heard. You wonder if maybe people just aren’t interested in what you have to say.
But they might be interested. Twitter just isn’t interested in letting them read your messages.
Shadowbanning is the censorship that social media companies do in the shadows. It’s cowardly and dishonest. And it’s how the big firms get away with covertly censoring conservatives.
"The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content," Abhinav Vadrevu, a former Twitter employee, explains in Project Veritas' undercover investigation of the company.
“They just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
Shadowbanning is the perfect metaphor for the big lie of social media. The big companies claim to empower you while they actually take away your voice. And they do it without you realizing it.
Or as Olinda Hassan, Twitter’s Policy Manager for Trust and Safety put it, “It's something we're working on where we're trying to get the s___ people not to show up.”
Social media has duplicated the media’s hypocritical claims of transparency and fairness. Facebook and Twitter claim that they aren’t media companies. But they act just like them.
And with these videos, James O’Keefe pivots from hammering the media to exposing social media.
"Twitter was probably about 90% anti-Trump, maybe 99%," Mo Norai, a former Content Review Agent, revealed. And censorship was subjective. Anti-Trump employees felt free to censor pro-Trump messages. Twitter doesn’t run on definitive rules, but on unwritten codes and biases.
And Twitter’s unwritten code was to censor the right and favor the left.
As the James Damore lawsuit against Google revealed, this monolithic mindset is achieved at big tech firms by a strategy of intimidation and scapegoating. The shutdown of conservatives at companies like Google and Twitter begins on the inside, and then when control has been consolidated, goes outside.
There’s a direct line between Google’s suppression of conservatives within the company and its smears of conservative sites. The same tactics that were used to smear conservative employees at Google are being aimed at conservative sites by Google. Shadowbanning is just a high tech version of shunning. And there’s a direct line between shunning conservatives at work and working to shun conservative users.
On the video, Norai reveals that there were, “A lot of unwritten rules.”
"We're in San Francisco, we're in California, a very liberal, a very blue state,” he explained. "As a company, you can't really say because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are a lot of rules."
The unwritten rules, like shadowbanning, are how the censorship sausage gets made. The big online companies that control search and social media pretend to be one thing, but are really another. The unwritten rules are part of a secret world that outsiders rarely get to hear about. Just as the Damore lawsuit exposed the hidden corporate culture at Google, the Veritas videos reveal the truth about Twitter.
Pranay Singh, a Twitter engineer admitted, that accounts are suspended sometimes for political reasons.
"Do you get requests from the government to take down celebrities?" a Project Veritas journalist asks.
"Oh, all the f____ time," he replies.
The conversation also reveals just how out of touch the tech industry is with the rest of the country.
"Just go to a random (Trump) tweet and just look at the followers. They'll all be like, guns, God, 'Merica, like, and with the American flag, and, like, the cross,” Singh spouts. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”
Algorithms are used to flag and delete accounts that Twitter employees think are bots. And Twitter employees live in such a leftist bubble that they think that patriots don’t really exist.
"You look for Trump, or America, or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck,” the engineer explains. A majority of the algorithms, he admits, target Republicans.
"So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?" he's asked.
"Yeah," he replies.
Tech companies start out by purging conservatives from their ranks. And then they set out to purge all conservatives. When a corporate culture has no room for intellectual diversity, then its staffers start to believer that people who think differently don’t even exist. Or shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
That’s the state of mind that totalitarian societies induce. And the Project Veritas videos reveal how well Twitter has succeeded. The 1% of conservatives at Twitter have learned to keep their mouths shut. Censorship at Twitter follows the political biases of the overwhelming majority of employees.
And while Twitter is a private company, it also has a great deal of power over the national discourse.
President Trump has boosted Twitter’s influence, but as the Project Veritas videos reveal, the company and its employees are deeply hostile to him. The company hasn’t found the courage to delete Trump’s account, but its employees clearly fantasize about the idea, one even went so far as to try and do it, and they eagerly shadowban, censor, harass and delete the Twitter accounts of Trump supporters.
Some of the Twitter censorship measures revealed by the Project Veritas videos were occasioned by the media’s claims that a ‘fake news’ conspiracy resulted in Trump’s victory. But others are purely a matter of bias. And between the push to purge social media of ‘fake news’ and political biases, conservatives are an endangered species on social media. Much as they’re all but extinct in the mainstream media.
But social media was meant to be different. Instead of being told what to read, watch and hear, you would set your own agenda. Anyone could create and share content. The media was done. Instead of having your morning or afternoon defined by CBS or CNN, it would be built around your interests.
And that was a lie.
The internet makes that possible. But the big search and social companies decide what you see. The same way that Netflix pushes Black Mirror: Twitter, Facebook and Google push their results. But the old mainstream media companies never tried to fool anyone into thinking they were democracies. You were going to watch what CNN wanted you to. And that was that.
Social media pretends to be a viral democracy. But its corporate overlords run it like a tyranny. Twitter, Facebook and Google are built on lie. They aren’t meritocracies of content. The game is rigged. And these videos pull back the curtain to show some of the men and women doing the rigging.
Have you been shadowbanned yet? Give it time and the people in this video will get around to it.
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I deactivated my twitter account yesterday. Just a cesspool and the more I hear about the SJWs that run it I don’t give a care anymore. I will miss a few tweets from Mollie Hemingway, James Woods, Sean Davis and a few others. The whole idea that twitter twits are driving the news is depressing to me. I am better off without their manipulation.
Since I seldom use Twitter, I won’t miss it if it’s gone. But these companies, including FB and Google, have too much power.
I’m waiting for a conservative billionaire to come up with a social media outlet that doesn’t ban a person for political reasons. (No terrorist groups need apply!)
The idea is to liken these companies to child predators: They flourish in secrecy, and don’t want anyone to expose them for what they really are. Exposure takes away their power. So, the more exposure, the less powerful.
Sort of John Galt of me, but I’ve never used Twitter & I will never draw a target on myself with a Facebook account.
I have an email address & a telephone number. That’s all the world needs.
My opinion really isn’t that important as to blast it out to the entire cosmos.
No different than what happens in mainstream media rooms. For decades.
They drive conservatives out or have some token moderate to be the conservative, and then have everyone left being liberal, and cant understand why ratings and subscriptions are tanking and why the country votes different than their “projected” polls.
Plus journalism is flooded now with young single women who by their demogrpahic are overwhelmingly liberal. Not surprising.
A FR poster said:
“I hope the corporate lawyers for Apple, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Oracle Systems, Twitter and Yahoo! are now on retainer and speed dial. They could quickly get sucked into this controversy, especially given that the then-CEO’s of these eight companies had a private dinner meeting hosted by President Obama (and his most trusted adviser, Valerie Jarrett), in San Francisco on February 17, 2011.”
Now I bypass my account and read Trump through a browser: https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump The main annoyance is full-page ads.
I’m definitely shadow-banned on twitter. No one comments or likes anything I say, even though I have plenty of followers who are conservative, and one family member. So now I just upvote.
I have a FB account only because of my children, nieces and nephews being on there. It is their chosen way of keeping in touch with each other, scattered over five states as they are. If push came to shove, I would get rid of FB. Period.
I do agree with you, however. And it would seem that FB is more intrusive than most people realize.
A perfect solution to this problem and others that plague ‘social’ media: Don’t use social media. Don’t read social media.
IMHO, ‘social’ media and television share some traits. Both have the potential to poison your mind.
I live in a very constrained computer environment (we never have viruses, at least), so twitter and facebook aren’t options. But even if they were, I doubt I’d want to be on either. When I click on a tweet here or on Conservative Treehouse, the Trump haters are just plain depressing. If I read about the tweet on a conservative site, instead, it’s surrounded by explanations and encouragement. That’s more than good enough.
That tiny circle above my laptop screen - said to be a camera so I put duct tape over it.
Of course, you don’t get political when you FB your loved ones so shadowbanning shouldn’t be a problem, IMO.
Thanks for that. Knowing Twitter shadow bans conservative makes it even less interesting. There are people I want to see but overall I can do without. This may be useful though.
I’ve had a Post-It 1/2” “flag” on the camera lens since I opened up this laptop for the first time. (Mutters: “The Bestids.”)
I try not to get too political on FB, saving the rants for FR, but some days, The Stupidity rules and I have to say “SOMEthing!”
Love your tagline!
Reminds me of when Germany was reunified in 1989 & libs instantly began fretting about the “possible return of the Fourth Reich”; said Hitler conceived his invasion plans late at night.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl who was a large man, reassured the worriers that the only thing he dreamed about invading at night was the refrigerator.
;^)
Thanks! My tagline is subject to be changed without notice.
I was in Germany with my ex-husband before it was unified, and I loved the country and the people. I don’t think I’d even recognize the place, today. And that’s really sad. It was beautiful.
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