sourcegraph
March 28, 2024

Make no mistake, when a twenty-something geek working for any of the big tech social media companies has the ability to covertly make an American invisible to everyone else on the platform, something isn’t right.

Now, with Elon Musk releasing some internal evidence that many conservative voices are being deliberately silenced, it will only further fuel mistrust that big tech companies unfairly scrutinize while hiding Behind their algorithmic arcane content prioritization.

Every social media platform claims that their proprietary algorithms are secret weapons that, if revealed to others, would diminish their competitive value in the marketplace. Big Tech hides behind the mystique of its algorithms, rarely offering any real insight into how it decides who is seen by others and who ends up silenced at the direct keystrokes of tech employees hiding behind screens.

While Musk promised to reveal when the Twitter account was banned, it left many wondering who might have been censored over the past few years.

Click to get KURT’s CYBERGUY newsletter with quick tips, tech reviews, security alerts and simple how-to’s to make you smarter

“Banning” is the direct blocking or partial blocking of someone’s online posts and comments without notification of the ban.
(Kurt Knudsen)

What is Shadow Ban?

“Banning” refers to directly blocking or partially blocking someone’s posts and comments on the Internet without notifying the person whose speech is being banned. When you get shadowbanned, you may never know it until the people who would normally engage with your posts report to you that they no longer receive any information from you.

Shadow bans first began in the 90s, when popular electronic bulletin boards found it necessary to remove harmful voices from their platforms. More often than not, spammers repeatedly offend others, disrupting or harming others by flooding the system with nonsense or a flood of messages designed to drown out other people’s voices.

Twitter feud has Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey argue over platform’s child safety protections

Today, every social media company practices censoring voices. What may have started as altruistic reasons to suppress voices online has now expanded to direct censorship of ordinary Americans simply expressing contradictory or unpopular views. Free speech has turned into a repressed freedom because there are few regulations preventing Big Tech from behaving like a big bully, stopping whoever they choose for any reason.

Today, every social media company practices censoring voices.

Today, every social media company practices censoring voices.
(Getty Images)

Forbidden Words

The practice of shadow bans has several words designed to sound mechanically innocuous. When you read any of the following, it’s just another way of undermining free speech.

  • to zoom in
  • review
  • ghost forbidden
  • Buck
  • hell ban
  • block
  • ranking drop
  • house arrest
  • blacklist

How to Send Spam Calls Straight to Voicemail on Your Phone

How To Find Out If You’ve Been Shadow Banned On Twitter

  1. Log out of your Twitter account
  2. A private web browser is usually launched by clicking “File” and then clicking “New Incognito Browser”, “New Private Window” or similar
  3. go https://twitter.com/explore Open the search page on Twitter
  4. Type “from: username” into the search field. For example, for my input “from:cyberguy”
  5. If the results contain little or no posts and replies from you, then you will be banned. If the results you see are your Twitter name (including your replies), then you are most likely not shadow-anned
In this photo taken on November 6, 2013, a man uses a smartphone in New York City.

In this photo taken on November 6, 2013, a man uses a smartphone in New York City.
(Reuters/Mike Seger)

In addition to the simple steps above, there are a few websites that have gotten attention for their claims to quickly test whether you’ve been blocked on Twitter.Here are the results when I submitted my twitter account @CyberGuy One such site.

Click here for the Fox News app

Copyright 2022 CyberGuy.com. all rights reserved. CyberGuy.com articles and content may contain affiliate links that earn commissions on purchases made.





Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *