Taking Back Our Stolen History
Shadow Banning
Shadow Banning

Shadow Banning

Sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning.” It is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view. For site owners, the ideal shadow ban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadow banned. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook silence users that they don’t want to appear in their follower’s timelines or feeds. This technique is used regularly to silence conservative voices without outright banning them which could cause a larger PR problem.

In January 2018, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas reveals in an undercover video how Twitter uses “shadow banning” and creates algorithms that censor certain ideas. The first clip features a former Twitter software engineer, Abhinav Vadrevu, who explains how/why Twitter “shadow bans” certain users:

The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.

But at the end of the day, no one else interacts… No one else sees what you’re doing. So, all that data is just thrown away. It’s risky though. Because people will figure that shit out and be like… You know, it’s a lot of bad press if, like, people figure out that you’re like shadow banning them. It’s like, unethical in some way. You know? So, I don’t know.

In the past people have been really, really pissed off about that. And even people who haven’t been shadow banned have called it, like, a really terrible thing to do. So, yeah, it’s a risky strategy.

I definitely know Reddit does this, but I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.

Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

In the full video (see below) Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Nora explains that Twitter doesn’t have an official written policy that targets conservative speech, but rather they were following “unwritten rules from the top”:

“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.”

“There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”

Meanwhile, Pranay Singh reveals again just how creepy Twitter can be by digging into your profile and conversation history to determine whether or not you’re a “redneck” and therefore worthy of being banned:

“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.”

When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”

Telling if an account has been shadow banned is extremely difficult, because the user’s profile acts exactly the same for the user. Many shadow banned users may not be aware they’re shadow banned until their followers inform them that they’re no longer seeing their tweets in their timeline. Breitbart Tech’s previous source claimed that Twitter was doing this on a regular basis:

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favored Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavored accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritized in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

It began with the unverification of Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos for an alleged rule violation that the company refused to divulge which sparked a massive backlash from Yiannopoulos’ devoted followers, some of whom emailed Twitter’s investors and advertisers. While we knew it was bad, however, we didn’t know that it was so bad that the social network would end up censoring videos that actually dealt with censorship.

It’s hypocritical in the extreme for providers to posture as if they were the digital inheritors of the Enlightenment legacy, but then carry on like a gang of Soviet apparatchiks, muzzling voices they disagree with and conducting ideological purges.

Twitter has been long accused of shadow banning and manipulating various metrics of user accounts. As Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars reported in August, 2016, Twitter was accused of suppressing tweets from then-candidate Trump in the home stretch of the US election, which some have construed as interfering:

Twitter is provably censoring Donald Trump in order to prevent him raising money for his presidential campaign.

A tweet sent out by Trump yesterday to promote his #MillionDollarMatch donation drive does not appear on Trump’s profile page nor did it appear on the feed of anyone following him.

You can check for yourself. Here is the tweet sent out by Trump yesterday and here is his main profile page – which doesn’t show the tweet. The tweet has been buried as if it never existed.

A Trump tweet in which he declared that “the establishment and special interests are absolutely killing our country” was also shadow banned by Twitter back in April 2016. While Twitter is censoring Trump, it has repeatedly been accused of gaming its algorithms in support of Hillary just like Google and YouTube. Back in February, users were irate after the social media giant censored the anti-Hillary hashtag #WhichHillary after it started trending.

Then in October, 2016, Dilbert creator Scott Adams was “shadowbanned” by  Twitter, which he noted on his blog:

This weekend I got “shadowbanned” on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies, but in a way that is not obvious until you do some digging.

Why did I get shadowbanned?

Beats me.

But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling.

Late last week my Twitter feed was invaded by an army of Clinton trolls (it’s a real thing) leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized.

At around the same time, a bottom-feeder at Slate wrote a hit piece on me that had nothing to do with anything. Except obviously it was politically motivated. It was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year.

And in March of 2017, Twitter was caught by Ed Dowd – a politically active former BlackRock money manager who noted in early February that Twitter was both “un-retweeting” several of his politically charged posts.

In one instance, Dowd made a decidedly subversive tweet pointing out that the NSA and CIA are “wiretapping” the entire country via continuously archived data collection – a story which Wired magazine broke in 2006 and gained tremendous clarity through the acts of whistleblower Edward Snowden.

When Mr. Dowd checked his twitter feed hours after sending the tweet, he saw that it had accumulated 13 Retweets and 38 Likes. Given the subject matter, he decided to take a screenshot. Lo and behold, upon reloading the tweet five minutes later, Dowd discovered that 11 retweets had mysteriously vanished.

Another phenomenon Dowd noticed was that while he would gain followers throughout the day, there was a reliable “purge” of followers in the dead of night, all around the same time. He began keeping track, and though it wasn’t happening every night, it penciled out to around half a percent of his followers each time it happened, effectively capping his audience. Ed had questions; why was it almost always the same number of people? Who un-follows someone in the middle of the night? Considering most of Dowd’s followers are in North America, the un-followers were likely asleep when it was happening. The logical conclusion was that Twitter had been actively pruning Ed’s audience to limit his growth on the platform.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has throttled, censored, or banned conservatives who speak their mind. Documentarian, author, and noted Trump supporter Mike Cernovich (@cernovich) tweeted about his own fan base evaporating around the same time as Dowd began experiencing the un-follows.

Twitter has consistently censored pro-lifers who use the platform to raise awareness on behalf of unborn babies. The tech giant in February 2018 barred pro-life group Human Coalition from advertising three pro-life tweets which were removed just three hours after they went up, the group said.

Other pro-life groups have battled similar suppression from Twitter such as Live Action who cried foul in 2017 after Twitter demanded it delete pro-life images, such as fetal ultrasounds, from its Twitter feed and website before allowing the group to run advertisements. Live Action refused the request. Another pro-life group, the Susan B. Anthony List, was barred in October 2017 from running a video advertisement, because it used the phrase “killing babies” to refer to abortion. “No advertiser is permitted to use the phrase ‘killing babies,’” Twitter told the group.

That same month, Twitter blocked an advertisement by Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s campaign for Senate in Tennessee. Twitter objected to one line Blackburn said: “I’m 100% pro-life. I fought Planned Parenthood, and we stopped the sale of baby body parts –thank God.” The tech giant demanded that Blackburn remove the reference to Planned Parenthood selling baby parts, but she refused and went on the offensive instead, demanding Twitter apologize for censoring her. Twitter reversed course after the ensuing backlash and allowed Blackburn to run the ad.

Facebook also practices shadowbanning to censor conservatives. Twitter, Facebook, as well as Reddit, Instagram, and YouTube (see below) have all used and continue to use shadowbanning to silence conservatives and alternative media.

Statistics Shadowbanning
With perhaps the most significant midterm election in decades nigh, big tech’s censorship of conservatives kicked into high gear in 2018. While Facebook’s purge of right-leaning pages is obvious and has made news, perhaps just as destructive is the stealth censorship. A good example may be the report of WordPress’ “statistics shadowbanning” of Whatfinger News.

Whatfinger is an increasingly popular news aggregator that is run by military veterans; it’s like a non-establishment version of Drudge, only more comprehensive, more conservative, and more interesting. And assuredly more targeted for destruction.

According to Whatfinger, the blog Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM), and other sites that have contacted Whatfinger, WordPress is now hiding referrals from the aggregator, a strategy that could alienate sites from Whatfinger by making them think it sends them no traffic. This would be a type of shadowbanning, which is “the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned,” as Wikipedia correctly puts it.

And what is the variation “statistics shadowbanning”? Put simply, let’s say a site is sending you 1,000 hits a day. Instead of recording and presenting this to you, your statistics service tells you that you have far fewer visits from the site — or none at all.

This is precisely what WordPress, a popular open-source website-creation company, is doing to Whatfinger, reports the aggregator and FOTM. As the latter wrote October 13, “Each day, we get hundreds and often thousands of referrals from Whatfinger, for which FOTM is most grateful. Beginning yesterday, I noticed something odd: There were no referrals from Whatfinger!”

It doesn’t seem that this was a mere glitch, as FOTM reports that WordPress stats were still presenting hits from other entities — just not Whatfinger. Moreover, it’s not just FOTM reporting this odd phenomenon, either. As Whatfinger wrote in a statement:

Many sites have now sent screenshots, sites that we send thousands of people to daily who are all noticing WordPress ‘shadowbanning of stats’ — we all now need to know the truth. Are all conservative sites targets? Will they blame some algorithm as Facebook likes to do? Can’t be just Whatfinger, since we are new and nowhere near the size of other sites just yet.

As for FOTM’s situation, its administrator provides more detail, writing:

… I went to FOTM‘s stats page, only to discover that WordPress had changed the referrals of the day before, Oct. 11, to remove all referrals from Whatfinger! The problem is, a day before, I had seen thousands of referrals from Whatfiinger [sic], which now had vanished, retroactively expunged by WordPress.

I then clicked on the referrals for September 29, 2018 — a day when FOTM had a record 35,438 unique views. I remember seeing there were thousands of referrals from Whatfinger that day, which WordPress now has retroactively expunged….

This matters because traffic is websites’ lifeblood — and your apparent traffic level will determine your marketability. Why would people advertise on your site, for instance, if they believe you offer little exposure? No advertising means no revenue, and this means a restricted capacity to spread your message.

Of course, this is precisely what left-wing Big Tech wants to do to conservative sites: wither them on the vine. GoogTwitFace (and WordPress can now be thrown in) also wants to control public opinion and thus defeat the GOP in November, as it seeks to establish leftist hegemony.

Big Tech also no doubt has a very immediate aim, too. The Republicans may be moving toward taking antitrust action against GoogTwitFace. So Big Tech is racing to forestall this: If it can help the Democrats flip the House of Representatives, guess what? That antitrust threat goes bye-bye.

Then Big Tech can continue suppressing Truth, facilitating tyranny (e.g., Google’s aiding of the Chinese government) and making money via its near monopoly. It’s one dark, malevolent hand washing the other, as the Democrats provide protection in exchange for continual de facto campaign contributions in the form of propaganda favoring their cause and the suppression of any truth contradicting it.

To put this in perspective, imagine living under a tyrannical government that indoctrinates people with an approved ideology and won’t let others even hear your ideas. Under a worst-case scenario, such censorship is essentially what Big Tech could visit upon us, as it now controls the public square. Sure, these would be private-sector machinations and thus wouldn’t violate the First Amendment.

But the practical effect is the same. You can’t win political power unless you can win the political debate, and you can’t win the political debate if you’re removed from it. A mouth muzzled — whether by big gov. or Big Tech — utters precisely the same thing: nothing. And that’s all Big Tech wants to hear from traditionalists. Voice of Europe reports that in “the past[,] the account of Whatfinger was already shadow banned by Facebook, Reddit and other sites, according to the owner[,] for supporting President Trump and criticising Islam.”

So that’s Big Tech, advancing little minds and big lies — and inviting big destruction.

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