
Ask HN: Why are the Twitter shadowban news articles being shadowbanned on HN? - personjerry
There&#x27;s just been an article about how Twitter shadowbans conservative politicians, and it&#x27;s being covered by several news outlets. I tried submitting several different sources but each one is being flagged and disabled. Why is this happening?<p>For example: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16128725<p>There was also a post of the direct source on Project Veritas which was flagged.
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grzm
These types of questions are tough, though I can imagine it may be one of a
variety of reasons:

\- There are already plenty of discussions on HN regarding bias and banning on
Twitter, which tend to repeatedly cover the same ground, much of which is
flame-covered, and some HN members may not want to see as many submissions
like this

\- Project Veritas (James O'Keefe) is known to be a unreputable source, with
numerous judgements against them going back years, and members may not want to
use this as a starting point of discussion for an already highly contentious
discussion.

†
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O'Keefe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O'Keefe)

\- It's a highly charged political topic and, as you note, is covered by
several news outlets. One of the guidelines for HN states _" Off-Topic: Most
stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some
interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points.
Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it
on TV news, it's probably off-topic."_ This story is hitting at least two of
those.

It's hard to know why people flag or downvote or upvote or submit, but there's
some speculation. One can disagree with some of the reasons I'm putting forth
(my mind-reading skills aren't what they used to be), or think it should be
discussed anyway: you can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer
and let them know. They've been known to unflag submissions in the past if
they think it's appropriate for HN.

Nit: Only members are shadowbanned. Submissions (and comments) can be flagged
or killed.

~~~
mkempe
If Twitter, Google, and Facebook were to use their dominant market+tech
positions to systematically eliminate some speech, without highly-public
visibility of the manipulation -- should one also eliminate stories about such
illiberal paths of the major technology companies?

~~~
grzm
These are valid and important questions, but let's not use this Ask HN to
relitigate them, as they're off-topic: there are plenty of other places where
this discussion has been had, and I'm sure will be again. If you have
additional ideas as to why members might have flagged them, I'm sure
'personjerry would appreciate them.

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gus_massa
Do you see that the submission is [dead]? Shadowbanning means that the article
is killed but the system "lies" to the author and to the autor the post looks
alive.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning)

These post look like normal flagged and killed post, where everyone (including
the author) can see they are flagged and killed. (You can enable shoedead in
your profile, to sea [dead] posts.)

------
mkempe
Stories about Google's search results that recently started to include false
denunciations of conservative websites are also being flagged -- aka shadow-
banned.

Another way stories are shadow-banned is that they are simply not shown to
other users, while the poster doesn't see a '[flagged]' tag (but there is no
'discuss' link).

Since these stories are being flagged, it is likely that comments on the same
topics are also being flagged.

