I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Albert Einstein
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The Recent Libertarian Purge on Twitter
Now I'm personally convinced I've been a minor victim of a variation shadow banning, at minimum under Google/Blogger and Twitter. I'm a bit of a statistics junkie, and mostly I have to point at certain anomalies from my point of view. For example, a few months back, I had a regular daily viewership of multiple dozen readers. Now I realize that reader counts aren't uniformly distributed, e.g., I get more of a bump when I first publish a new post. But usually there's a scattering of views over the coming day. In that context, I have seen stretches of 10 hours or more without a single hit. Now it isn't unusual for my daily readership to fail to break double-digits.Is it proof? No. It's possible, for example, Google's readership algorithms have changed, EU policies on privacy (vs., say, Google browser cookies) have had an effect, the interest in pro-liberty issues is down in a general trend, etc. Maybe, e.g., during no readership periods, Google is doing maintenance also affecting other users. Maybe I wrote some posts that pissed off a large number of regular readers (although Google indicates only one follower to this blog).
It could be, of course, say, if most of my readers come from google.com, that my posts may now be buried, e.g., on the 39th vs. 4th page of reader searches, and maybe Google wants me to pay for the privilege of promoting my blog.
And it's always possible some leftist or Trumpkin malcontents are complaining to Blogger, and Blogger has responded unilaterally without notice. I don't see the business case for Google censorship, driving content to other platforms, but Google in the recent past publicly fired an engineer for daring to question politically correct policies.
Twitter has been more explicit. There have been 2 occasions over the past 6 months or so (unprecedented in 5 years of membership) where they imposed a 12-hour suspension of sorts for unenumeried violations of theirr policies. Unlike these gentlemen, I wasn't asked to delete any tweet, but they still rubbed my nose in it, basically demanding I acknowledge their sanction before the 12-hour silencing period would start, i.e., my followers and I could see my tweets but nobody else. While Twitter denies shadow banning, I know this definitely fits the definition. I recall one hypocritical leftist butt-hurt snowflake troll tweeted a threat to report me for "abuse". Contradicting another person's point of view is not "abuse". I've run into a small number of cowardly "snipe-tweet-and-block" leftist bastards over the last couple of years. I understand that Statist Twitter users aren't going to be happy with many of my tweets; they seem to think the First Amendment applies only for their own convenience.
It's more difficult to show the specifics of shadow banning. There have been sometimes I've published a tweet, particularly directly at politicians, e.g., Lizzie Warren, and later I couldn't even find the tweet in my history. My number of 1000+ impression tweets has really dropped over the past 6 months. For a couple of years, my followers seemed to oscillate in the 30-40 range and suddenly surged to 70-74 when I decided to leave Twitter in a month-long protest earlier this year. Since my return, the numbers are softer, mostly down, and my followers are range-bound again.
There's one point being made in the video that I particularly want to draw attention to: business relationships between government and social mediation. For example, Google seems ready to cooperate with Chinese government censorship efforts. There are some deals under consideration with the US government. The US government is constitutionally prohibited from engaging in any business which would violate the Bill of Rights, including collusion in violations of the First Amendment or privacy rights (e.g., the Fourth Amendment).
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Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne via Townhall |
