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Twitter Does Not “Shadow Ban”

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Twitter released an important message on July 26, 2018, letting the world know that they do not Shadow Ban but they do want Twitter to be a safe place for everyone.

What is shadow banning?

The best definition is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.

Statement by Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour

We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.

As a specific example, if a search result has 30,000 tweets, here’s what we take into consideration when ranking:

  • Tweets from people you’re interested in should be ranked highly
  • Tweets that are popular are likely to be interesting and should be higher ranked
  • Tweets from bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or divide the conversation should be ranked lower

This last bullet is the basis of our work around serving healthy public conversation. Here are some of the signals we use to determine bad-faith actors:

  1. Specific account properties that indicate authenticity (e.g. whether you have a confirmed email address, how recently your account was created, whether you uploaded a profile image, etc)
  2. What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)
  3. How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)

We know this approach is working because we see fewer abuse reports and spam reports.

I applaud Twitter and welcome not only the attention conversations but also the rapid action to conversations that are harmful and hateful.

Social Media is complex. You need a professional to protect your business brand, navigate the spam and hate speech, along with professionally posting and responding and talking to your customers.  Contact Sabrina to start handling your social media marketing.

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Sabrina Espinal
Sabrina&Company

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