This story is backwards. Twitter is disabling shadow banning of prominent Republicans. The algorithm shadow banned them, and they manually re-enabled them. So the favoritism is towards Republicans, not against them.
> Some clarification from Twitter on the whole ‘some conservative accounts not showing up like normal in search’ thing: some accounts are not automatically populating in the search box and the company is apparently shipping a change to address this.
What will he do when he finds out that they were shadow banned because they were using armies of bots to increase their reach? Will he admit that it's a totally appropriate way to reduce the spread of fake news?
This is political theater, not a credible threat against Twitter's right to censor its own platform. It isn't even censoring based on political affiliation, but rather the content of tweets.
Sad to see that the first 3 comments here are justifying and defending twitter shadow banning republican politicians. That's quite something. I would really love if there was an investigation into why the internet and social media all of a sudden has so many comments advocating for censorship. Almost everyone I talk to is against censorship and for open discourse and against social media picking sides. And yet, on the internet, it's nonstop advocacy for censorship. I don't think it's russian trolls either.
It's not just censorship on social media. There has been a surprising attack against net neutrality as well. And even defense of europe's "meme law". Maybe I'm just in a bubble where people are for free speech, against throttling and against criminalizing memes. But I don't think so. It just feels like there is an organized campaign for censorship being pushed all over social media and the internet.
Much like you can ask anyone to leave your property, but can't censor them on public property. The Internet, as a network, should uphold free speech, that's why Net Neutrality is important. Particular servers, even if the POTUS decides to use one as his soapbox, have no such requirement.
This is a fine sentiment at small scale, but once a service becomes significant, close to mandatory, in daily life, the other aspects become overwhelming.
For sake of example, as much as I detest various extremists [†], I would strongly oppose blocking[‡] the extremists from local power company's electric grid (which is a publicly traded stock company in here), from the local telephone exchange (which in my city is a public-private partnership, IIRC), or yes, from the most popular microbloging platform out there. In 2018, Twitter access is about as necessary as phone exchange access in 1990s.
200 years ago cutting off either would have been fine, a non-issue really, as there was infrastructure, services, and knowledge & skills in place to lead normal life without electricity, running water, comms, etc.. But right now one doesn't simply go about the necessities of daily life - work, shopping, health care, etc. - without electricity and fast communications.
There's two competing approaches to the problem of extremism, hate, and disinformation: either "giving them voice empowers them", or "sunlight is the best disinfectant / let them speak so everybody can see their idiocy", and I happen to firmly belong in the later camp. From my POV, we aren't experiencing increase in extremism right now - quite the opposite; thanks to the modern tools we've noticed how bad it used to be in the hiding, and are successfully fixing the problems now that they surfaced.
I shed no tears for all the Twitters, Facebooks, Googles, etc. fall victims to their own success - becoming so successful they became widely considered necessities. They are still quite profitable with all the problems that causes, and all the constraints it puts on them. And that's not necessarily permanent state either; going by historical examples, access to MS Windows, or ability to listen to radio, or access to horse pastures used to be such necessities back in their heyday, but aren't terribly important anymore.
[†] that is not to imply republicans are extremists.
[‡] outside of criminal activity, which is mostly accepted as fair ground for bans and content removal - but is neither specific, nor unique, to trolls, haters, or extremists.
I could not disagree more that Twitter is as necessary as phones ever were in the last 50 years.
I don't ever visit it and am a happy, productive tech worker. I never miss it, and no one I know talks about it in person. I don't personally know any active users.
Its main influence on daily life seems to be when real media re-broadcasts the Twitter speech of famous people.
Facebook could be argued to be essential much more easily and has an order of magnitude more MAUs, but I'd disagree even with that. Lots of normal people I know (including many reading this) have quit FB and not looked back.
Someone who quit landline phones in the 90s would've been considered a nut or a recluse. The only alternative for communicating with them was the postal service, and there was no instantaneous alternative.
