On Thursday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that the company is developing an update that will inform users if they have been shadowbanned, provide details about the ban, and explain how they can appeal the decision. The term “shadowbanning” refers to the practice of removing a user’s content or making it invisible to other users without the user’s knowledge. It’s been criticized for being used to silence certain voices or views, but it’s a common tool used by social media platforms to hide accounts that break their terms of service or community standards.
Musk added that Twitter would soon begin deleting 1.5 billion inactive accounts to make room for new users. This means that inactive accounts that haven’t been logged into or tweeted from in a long time will be deleted and made available for use by other people. The goal of this change is to improve the platform’s organization and make it less difficult for users to locate the accounts they need.
These declarations followed the publication of the second installment of journalist Bari Weiss’ “Twitter Files,” which exposed the platform’s secret blacklisting of certain tweets and users. According to Weiss’s reporting, teams of Twitter employees construct blacklists, stop unpopular tweets from trending, and actively suppress entire accounts’ visibility without notifying the accounts’ owners or the public. She brought up the fact that Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and Dan Bongino of Fox News were both on the “Do Not Amplify” and “Search Blacklist.”
According to Weiss, former Deputy General Counsel James Baker was “exited” from Twitter after revelations about his alleged role in the platform’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Journalist Matt Taibbi published over the weekend internal communications from Twitter’s top brass in October 2020 about how to counter the New York Post’s publication of materials about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Many Twitter users have voiced their disapproval and expressed concern over the platform’s lack of transparency and accountability after learning of the company’s practices of secretly blacklisting certain tweets and users. There has been a call for Twitter to be more open about its moderation policies and practices, as well as for an investigation into the situation. Others have claimed that Twitter is biased and suppresses certain viewpoints.
It is widely viewed as a positive development that Musk has announced a software update that will inform users if they have been shadowbanned and how to appeal. The effectiveness of the update and whether or not it resolves the issues and concerns voiced by users and critics are both open questions.
It is widely agreed that Twitter’s decision to remove 1.5 billion dormant accounts will enhance the service by making it simpler to discover and follow relevant accounts. The number of platform users who will be impacted by this update and its potential effects remain unknown.
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