Twitter and Facebook Deny ‘Shadowbanning’ in Senate Hearing

Representatives from both Twitter and Facebook denied engaging in “shadowbanning” in response to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) t0day, although Twitter’s representative went on to describe practices that mirrors the covert censorship almost exactly.

“Does Twitter or Facebook engage in shadowbans?” asked Sen. Cruz, during today’s Senate judiciary committee hearing on technological censorship.

Turning to Twitter’s representative, Sen. Cruz said “you testified before, or you acknowledged that Twitter will downgrade a comment to make it less visible. Does Twitter notify a person if their comment has been downgraded?”

“If we have signals indicating that a person is being a spammy, meaning they are using multiple accounts to do the same, if they are doing automated activity but we’re not 100 percent sure that they are breaking our rules, if they’re abusive then what we will do is make it harder for that content to be found in a couple of different places – one is in search results, and the other is in conversations — the replies.” . . .

“At no point, sir, is a person’s followers unable to find what that person has tweeted,” said the Twitter spokesman. (Read more from “Twitter and Facebook Deny ‘Shadowbanning’ in Senate Hearing” HERE)

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