The IT Nerd

Elon Musk once upon a time was highly critical of the use of shadowbans. He argued that shadow bans were anti free speech. But I am guessing that things have changed on that front as he’s now pro shadowban if you criticize him on Twitter:

In January, Elon Musk shared a post that railed against a moderation practice colloquially known as “shadowbanning”—where the visibility of a given account or post is secretly limited but not removed from the platform, creating a Kafka-esque experience where users unknowingly post into the void, only discoverable by people who know exactly where to look.

In August, after the self-appointed free speech crusader renamed the platform to X, he vaguely promised that a new mechanism that tells users if they have been shadowbanned would be coming “soon.”

But as of November, the opposite was happening. Instead of shining a light on the practice, various accounts on X who made critical posts about Musk have been shadowbanned with no explanation.

The specific sort of shadowban applied to these accounts is known as a search suggestion ban, which limits an account from showing up in search results.

Several accounts have been slapped with search suggestion shadowbans in recent weeks, including: this journalist, USA Today journalist Will Carless, an NBC affiliate account focused on LGBTQ+ news, and a Texas anti-cryptocurrency activist group.

There’s plenty of debate around the exact definition of the term “shadowban,” but Musk made clear that search suggestion bans, which effectively deamplify accounts by making them harder to find, fit the definition.

And:

My own account was shadowbanned in late October after I posted a thread noting that the Maine mass shooter Robert Card liked a number of Musk’s posts. 

I made a number of other posts critical of Musk around the same time. After a follower informed me that my account wasn’t showing up in search, I ran a quick check on the Shadowban Test website, which confirmed I had been slapped with a search shadowban. Comments from other users confirmed the results.

The same test showed that NBC Out, a division of NBC News featuring LGBTQ-centric news, was also saddled with a search suggestion ban in October after the account shared an article about how some LGBTQ people say the platform has become toxic under Musk’s leadership. 

X also shadowbanned Carless of USA Today, who writes about right-wing extremism and recently released a report about Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs the Libs of TikTok account and is friendly with Musk online. The report found a pattern of bomb threats against subjects of her viral posts—which often are schools and hospitals.

This illustrates how thin skinned Elon is. There’s no other way to describe this as clearly Elon cannot deal with any sort of criticism like a fully functional adult. Now I don’t expect that Elon will alter this behaviour now that this is public. But shining a light on it does expose just how much of a horrible person he is and how he’s killing Twitter (and beyond) by his actions.

The cesspool of hate speech that is Twitter has an old foe reappear to point it that it’s failing miserably at controlling hate speech. The Hill is reporting that Twitter isn’t removing hate speech related to the Israel/Gaza conflict as observed by the CCDH. Now if the CCDH sounds familiar, they should. They’re the group that got sued by Elon and clowns for calling them out on Twitter’s lack of will when it comes to stopping hate speech on Twitter. Here’s the TL:DR on the CCDH’s latest observations:

CCDH researchers reported 200 posts promoting hate speech, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian hate, using X’s own tools on Oct 31. A week later, 196 of the posts were still hosted on X, according to the report.  

The 200 posts reported were all posted after Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, and the majority directly addressed the conflict between Israel and Hamas.  

The posts that remained up accrued more than 24 million views collectively, according to the report.  

The 200 posts were published by 101 separate X accounts. According to CCDH, only one of the accounts was suspended and two of the accounts were “locked,” which meant they were unable to post content until removing the reported posts. 

Of the 101 accounts identified in the study, 43 were verified users through X’s monthly subscription platform, according to the report. Users that pay for the X monthly subscription get additional features, including a verified check mark.  

Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of CCDH, said the report to test X’s content moderation system capacity, “reveals that hate actors appear to have free rein to post viciously antisemitic and hateful rhetoric on Elon Musk’s platform.” 

Elon loves to complain that reports like these are driving advertisers from the platform and giving Twitter a bad name. But advertisers wouldn’t leave the platform and Twitter wouldn’t have a bad name if Elon did something about hate speech on the platform. But of course he won’t address this problem because he’s clearly fine with that. Which I guess tells you all you need to know about the character of Elon Musk and anyone who works for him in any area of responsibility at Twitter, like his puppet CEO Linda Yaccarino for example. At the end of the day, if when Twitter fails, it will be Elon’s fault for not addressing issues like this.