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Archive for March, 2017

Twitter is Trying to Drive Out Particular High-Profile Accounts, Based on Nothing Illegitimate That They Did

OVER the past 12 days Twitter has been on some sort of campaign against me, which I doubt is purely powered by algorithms, for reasons I explained here yesterday. I spoke to Wikileaks yesterday and they too said they had heard of similar things. I may be one of several accounts that are targeted, so it’s worth documenting everything. I should clarify that, to the best of my knowledge, I never violated Twitter’s ToS. This morning I got shadowbanned again, for absolutely no reason that I can think of, such as commenting on Wikileaks, being ‘rude’ to someone, critical of something, highlighting a tweet (mention), or posting ‘too’ much. Nothing. To make matters worse, the frequency of the bans is increasing. Over time it gets more frequent (the duration too had already increased prior to that, it’s always 24 hours long, not 6 or 12 hours long). It has escalated since 12 days ago, which means that my time outside the box, so to speak, is getting smaller and smaller (now it’s just a few hours before the subsequent shadowban). In my previous 2 articles on the topic I explained possible reasons for this, or rather, utterly poor reasons for any such actions by Twitter (I cannot even think or have a guess at reasons anymore). Here is what my tweets’ traffic has looked like over the past 12 days, corresponding or agreeing with the above trend (growing frequency of bans).

twitter-suppression

It’s incredible, isn’t it? Based on what I’ve seen online (relatively shallow research), I am far from alone. Here is one example that I stumbled upon (a high-profile account). This seems to be related to some of the latest Twitter policy changes, which are cryptic and rather offensive to all those who contributed — free of charge — a lot of so-called ‘content’ for Twitter to make money from.

Censored by Twitter for Mentioning Being Censored by Twitter

330px-Zeng_Liansong's_proposal_for_the_PRC_flag.svg

CENSORSHIP by Twitter has been getting absolutely ridiculous lately and I have devised methods to estimate the time (and thus cause) of shadowbans, as explained here last week. Twitter attempts to make shadowbans somewhat of an enigma; people are rarely aware of it and thus do not talk about it. If more people spoke about shadowbans, there would be anger and a lot of people would probably walk away. There seems to be a system of escalation with shadowbans, wherein the duration expands from 6 hours, to 12 hours, and now it’s always 24 hours in my case. It means people cannot see me in notifications, in search results, in hashtag pages, and cannot even see my replies to other tweets. That’s what shadowbans are and this is how they work; the visibility restrictions too seem to be escalating. Twitter is becoming more and more Draconian over time, and censorship is broadened using all sorts of pretexts, such as “hate speech”, “trolls”, “fake news” and so on (the excuse du jour).

The latest wave of shadowbans against me can be traced back to the following events:

  1. mentioning Vault 7 in response to Wikileaks tweets about Vault 7 upon the release of Vault 7 (definitely on topic, polite, and very highly ranked among the responses)
  2. being trolled by an Alt Reich troll and responding to that troll, the context being Wikileaks again.
  3. mentioning Menwith Hill, in an on-topic fashion, in response to a Wikileaks tweet about Deep State presence in Europe. The shadowban was applied very soon afterwards, which makes it seem like state secrets or something along those lines was the pretext/cause.
  4. mentioning censorship by Twitter, namely the above 3 shadowbans against me, in Twitter. Just say it to a large audience and see your tweet vanish from visibility.

Welcome to China!

In 10 days Twitter shadowbanned me for 96 hours (24 hours x 4), i.e. about half the time, for reasons that were not satisfactory unless one lives in China.

Welcome to Twitter. It’s like Facebook, just with shorter posts.

Twitter Stands for Censorship

Twitter is Censorship

YESTERDAY, after I had written a lot about Vault 7 and Wikileaks, Twitter shadow-banned me. The effect of it can be seen above. I did not insult anyone, I did not link to a dodgy Web site, I was very much on topic, and people showed genuine interest in what I was posting. But Twitter is not interested in free speech. Twitter is a business, so presumably it can just kick-ban, permanently terminate accounts, or even shadow-ban (as in my case) any time it feels like it. No explanations are made available and there’s no point bothering to ask (I tried many times).

A month ago Twitter also banned (for good) JoinDiaspora, a site through which I posted to Twitter. They banned the whole relay, in an act of collective punishment (or collective censorship) against many thousands of legitimate users.

Don’t ever rely on Twitter for free speech. Based on the recent news, things are only getting worse there over time (more restrictions on speech). This is why I call so-called “social media” just social control media. They conquer and dominate (even by omission/deletion) channels of communication between people.

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