Why Twitter Shadowbanning Matters

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other users accessing the site.

Listening to the All In podcast has become a bit of a Saturday morning tradition for me. As mainstream media continues to become nothing but a mouthpiece for whoever pays them the most, it has really become a place where civil discourse and necessary conversations reign supreme.

As of this writing, the All In podcast is the number 12 most listened to podcast in the country. Why? Because it's a bunch of highly opinionated, intelligent, multimillionaires discussing current events and the implications they have for the country and the world at large. They can’t be bought and paid for so their opinions are their own. They don’t run ads. They just get together once a week to discuss current events and invite you to follow along and form your own opinion.

And most recently they discussed the release by Elon Musk of the so-called Twitter files. The investigation, per Bari Weiss, who herself was among the blacklisted independent journalists, goes on to show that teams of Twitter employees “...built blacklists, prevented dis-favorited tweets from trending, and actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or trending topics, – all done in secret without informing users.”

The most damaging case, from a national perspective, was the shadow banning of Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that Covid lock downs would harm children. A claim that, now we are on the other side of lock downs and have the benefit of hindsight, we see was entirely valid. Twitter secretly placed him on a blacklist which prevented his Tweets from trending.

The issue here is this was a calculated attack on free and open discourse. The decision to lock down the country was a public policy decision that affected everyone in our country, regardless of race, political ideology, sex or sexual orientation. Everyone was affected by the Covid lock down, most notable, our children, as Dr. Bhattacharya rightfully claimed.

When integral policy decisions like this are to be made, experts need to be able to have free and open discourse. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Bhattacharya should have been able to engage in a free and open debate regarding the pros and cons of a Covid lock down. Instead Dr. Bhattacharya’s (valid) opinion was effectively silenced, quietly and nefariously.

And this simply continues to buy into the much broader trends we are seeing across all sectors of the economy and world. The atomization of every sector, from finance (Robinhood and personally managed accounts), to entertainment (Tiktock and personal creators), to now news. Millennials and below or no longer getting their news from mainstream outlets. With the advent of independent podcasters, Youtubers, and newsletters like the Morning Brew, the younger generations are leaving mainstream media in droves. News outlets, such as Fox and MSNBC, have been right and left leaning, respectively, for years now. But with the release of this most recent scandal, it really has become clear that national news outlets are slowly becoming nothing but state tv.

The press likes to celebrate its perceived role in society in movies such as the Post, where they were instrumental in exposing the Pentagon Papers. And even more recently, the movie Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture for shedding light on the Catholic Church abuse scandal in Boston. The press likes to inhabit this identity of speaking truth to power. Being an impartial mediator that reports noteworthy happenings.

But what happens when press becomes the powers that be? When press outlets run story after story attacking the working conditions at Twitter under the new Musk regime, and yet still celebrate the New York Times, even as their workers walk out on strike?

It really is going back to the idea put forward by Balaji Srinivasan, about how society is moving toward the individual as sovereign. If we can’t rely on the government to provide correct information, we need to find our own sources of information.

While the conservative right has their own issues, most notably reversing 50 years of case law in Roe vs Wade in nothing more than what can be described as a hissy fit, the ultra progressive left claim to be the “protectors of democracy” and yet sit here and actively attempt to silence important voices that do not fit with their agenda.

As Balaji states on episode #606 of the Tim Ferriss show, we vilify China for the way it controls and treats its populace. China employs hard power to keep its citizenry in line, while also providing just enough social mobility to keep people happy enough with the status quo. In a very real sense, the CCP employs both the use of the carrot and the stick. This is hard power.

The U.S., and most notably, the progressive left, uses a form of soft power that is just as nefarious. While we don’t have physical reeducation camps in this country, we do have a cancel culture where anyone, from comedians, to professors, to politicians, can have their careers destroyed if they say the wrong thing. To be clear, we are nowhere near as bad as China, but we are not their opposite either. Power and coercion is still power and coercion.

If China is the nightmare Orwell foresaw in Nineteen Eighty Four, the current state of US culture is more akin to the dystopian world Huxley paints in Brave New World. It’s not that books are banned, it's that corporations make a living selling us cheap dopamine in the form of Netflix and free porn to the point where no one has the attention span to read a book. Every other 19 year old girl has an OnlyFans and hookup culture is actively promoted. There’s a stigma around women who do not want to go out into the workforce and families are encouraged to turn their kids over to daycare and school for 12 out of the 16 waking hours of the day, having no say in what they are taught during those hours.

There is a silver lining though. The midterm election showed us that people will vote for politicians who are in the middle. People want moderates. People want compromise. All the pundits were predicting a red wave, and with Biden’s approval rating and abysmal track record, it really should have been a layup for the Republican to take both houses of Congress.

Instead we saw almost all the Trump backed Republicans lose, and almost all the complete bans on abortion fail. Why? Because these candidates and these policies are too extreme. We need free and open discourse. We need compromise. We need to be making policy decisions that reflect the will of the people and the issues currently facing us.

Which is why shadow banning matters. If you are banned for inciting violence or in some way violating a private company's code of conduct, you should be told about it, told why, and how you can appeal the decision. The nefarious practice of shadow banning is nothing but an attempt of soft power and coercion by companies that have long proven they do not have this country's best interests at heart, and only serve to strengthen the argument for Section 2.30 reform.

Today, in this moment, we can’t take for granted that America and the Pax Americana will simply continue to exist. We need to be actively trying to cultivate the best possible policy decisions for the most amount of people. Not simply virtue signaling. Not simply trying to push an agenda. Not simply trying to get rich by screwing people with a product that can never or will never work (see Theranos).

I’ll close with this. On episode 634 of the Tim Ferriss podcast, Niall Ferguson, the Oxford educated historian, has this fascinating opinion of history which I entirely agree with. He speaks about how history is often taught today as a collection of facts and dates. It's sterile and boring and seeks to condemn certain people, cultures and civilizations by using our ethics and maxims as a measuring stick. Which is really not the point at all.

The point of looking at history is to analyze the counterfactuals. To look at important events in history and realize that where we are today was not inevitable. It was not inevitable that the Allies would win World War II. It was not inevitable that the Cuban Missile Crisis would end in diplomacy. And it was not inevitable that Ukraine would stand firm in the face of Russian invasion in February 2022.

In fact, any learned strategist would have told you that, most likely, Kiev would have fallen within two weeks. And yet, Zelensky uttered his now famous line “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition,” which galvanized a nation and skewed history in its current direction.

We are creating history everyday, and if tech companies and news outlets are allowed to shape a narrative that perhaps no one has thought out (because they’re all thinking short term with their wallets), then we could end up in a very inhospitable landscape. One that might be entirely unrecognizable from the one we grew up in.

Because as Lex Friedman said on episode #100 of the Huberman Podcast, Ukraine has shown that we can have a hot war, here, in the 21st century. That we really have no idea what the future will hold. The foundations of our society are fragile, and we must be the shepherds of our own civilization.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

-Ronald Regan