US Rep. Matt Gaetz to File Complaint with FEC Against Twitter for Shadow Ban. Twitter Stock Drops by Whopping 20% as It Loses Its Audience
By JW Williams
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Gaetz argued that Twitter may have illegally donated to the campaigns of his opponents on the left by prejudicing against his content and limiting his social media visibility. He compared it to a billboard company refusing to provide space for one party, which the FEC would consider to be an illegal corporate donation.
An investigation from the far-left Vice Magazine found that only conservatives users were being subjected to the Twitter search filtering that impacted Gaetz. The lawmaker said that Twitter and other social media platforms use the federal government to get rid of lawsuits that they want dismissed by using a provision stating that they are a neutral public forum, yet they are enacting political censorship.
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Twitter responded to accusations of shadow ban censorship by denying that they use this tool, which they narrowly defined as “deliberately making someone’s content discoverable to everyone except the person who posted it.” However, Twitter then admitted that it does shadow ban users by blocking tweets from accounts users choose to follow from showing up in their feeds. What is the point of of a ‘follow’ button if tweets from people you want to follow don’t appear in your feed?
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey further admitted that users’ timelines are ranked, and those tweets deemed ‘irrelevant’ do not appear. Dorsey was referring to a “quality filter” which is on by default. Most Twitter users don’t even know how to turn this filter ‘off’.
Twitter also said in their blog post, they use three signals when determining whether an account is a “bad faith actor” and will ultimately be ‘down ranked’ (shadow banned). One of the signals includes how others interact with you, and if enough people mute or block you, your tweets get further down-ranked. The left stages mass-blocking campaigns, weaponizing the system to silence and censor their opposition.
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas recorded Pranay Singh, a direct messaging engineer for Twitter, on video admitting that the company uses shadow banning to censor conservatives and Republicans.
Twitter stock tumbled 20% Friday after user numbers declined.
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