“Shadow banning,” like Nunes’ “unmasking” claims, or his “incidental collection” claims, or his “no evidence of collusion” claims, is completely not real. Twitter has explained that at times it has failed to relay messages from all users, but a few users have convinced themselves this phenomenon isn’t a glitch, but an intentional suppression of their vital, impressive, and absolutely interesting speech. Proof? If that wasn’t the case, then why don’t more people read their stuff?
The evidence that Twitter’s flaws have hit both left and right are there for anyone who bothers to look—and often irritating to anyone who tries to use the service and would simply like to get What Was Written, When It Was Written rather than having Twitter’s algorithms keep pitching up the same “popular” tweets that have already been seen before. But Nunes has bought into a theory that Twitter isn’t just engaged in an irritating effort to please by showing users “good stuff.” He believes they are somehow flagging accounts on the right and placing a blue birdy thumb on the scale to hold them down. The fact that this would require a level of human intervention that Twitter has never begun to demonstrate doesn’t seem to bother the people who cling to this theory.
But the fact that Nunes picked out tweets such as Devin Nunes’ Cow calling him “udderly ridiculous” or Devin Nunes’ Mom threatening to take away his Minecraft privileges and put them in the lawsuit ... it’s just … extra tasty. And, in a perfect demonstration of how the system works, both those accounts are seeing huge increases in their popularity.
The Cow account, which had just over 1,000 followers before Nunes filed suit, had 28,000 by Monday night, and 53,000—and growing—on Tuesday morning.
Devin, the secret sauce of Twitter isn’t an algorithm. It’s the users. And they don’t like you. They really don’t like you.
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