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Scott Adams claimed in Feb 2017:

You might have clicked on my misleading tweet to get to this page. I had to disguise the content so Twitter wouldn’t throttle it.

Here’s why…

This morning I tweeted a link to a great video that describes in detail how Twitter “throttles” the tweets of any content that disagrees with their political views. The video describes how Twitter gives a fake message that some tweets are no longer available, to discourage you from clicking to them. The tweets still exist, and you can access them by directly clicking the links in the tweets, but most people would not think to do that.

Scott Adams discusses a NSFW1 video which accused Twitter of this behaviour.

The question is: Is Twitter throttling tweets of its users, as Scott Adams claims?

1 - contains foul language.

user56reinstatemonica8
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    Related: [Does Twitter censor content with a double standard?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36024/does-twitter-censor-content-with-a-double-standard) It shouldn't be closed though ... –  Feb 05 '17 at 19:34
  • Is Scott Adams the author of the popular Dilbert comic? Is that why this is notable? –  Feb 05 '17 at 19:42
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    @fredsbend. Yes, and a popular blog too –  Feb 05 '17 at 20:30
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    This is a legitimate question, but it's probably not answerable at this time because Twitter's algorithm is a trade secret. – Avery Feb 06 '17 at 01:20
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    @Avery:. Unless it can be shown that these glitches occur equally to all readers - e.g. they are caused by scaling issues on popular content rather than deliberate suppression. – Oddthinking Feb 06 '17 at 02:36
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    @Ilya: Foul language, homophobia, borderline sexism, ad hominem attacks, etc. – Oddthinking Feb 06 '17 at 02:38
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    @Oddthinking - there are numerous reports from people that Adams' posts don't show when they should - and indications are that this started when he started posting content complimentary to Trump on his posts (I refuse to use social media, so woudn't know how to tell one way or the other) – user5341 Feb 06 '17 at 04:09
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    @user5341: Pure speculation: A post by a popular user, including Scott Adams, is going to be read by zillions of people. Rather than store it on a single server unable to keep up with the load, Twitter are going to duplicate it to caches around the world. The caching algorithm itself is going to get snowed under sometimes. So, sometimes when a user retweets a tweet, a message appears "Tweet is unavailable". Clicking on the tweet brings it up. I have seen this behaviour, and I am not a mover-and-shaker on Twitter, which was the video's claim. My point: Hanlon's Razor should be applied. – Oddthinking Feb 06 '17 at 06:00
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    @Oddthinking You may be right. The issue is whether it is possible to distinguish between a "glitch" and deliberate action by Twitter's administrators. – matt_black Feb 06 '17 at 10:14
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    Considering how many Nazi and other abusive accounts go unmoderated on Twitter, this is almost certainly a glitch. – The Forest And The Trees Feb 06 '17 at 11:46
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    @Oddthinking. We are talking days here, not minutes –  Feb 06 '17 at 13:21
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    Can we get a more formal definition of what "throttling" means in this context? Because as a programmer to me it means "Slowing down request processing in order to cope with a backlog or to keep a service as a whole up and running even if some individual requests don't get serviced promptly". By that definition, Twitter does and has throttled for years because they rate-limit the number of HTTP requests you can make – GordonM Feb 06 '17 at 14:05
  • @GordonM Yes, it's defined in the video. I had made that clear in the original OP that Oddthinking edited. –  Feb 06 '17 at 14:09
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    @TheForestAndTheTrees - are any of them notable with **tons** of followers? – user5341 Feb 06 '17 at 21:43
  • I will say that I often have the devil's own time finding old tweets of mine in my profile. So it does look like there is some algorithm in there that picks and choses what old tweets of yours to show. However, unless @Jack there is a big Arsenal fan, its pretty clearly not done due to any content disagreement. So I suspect this is mostly some combo of a poorly understood algorithm and a few hyper-defensive users. – T.E.D. Feb 06 '17 at 22:23
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    @fredsbend - IMHO this is definitely notable. I've heard this claim repeated on twitter a **lot**, going back months. I've tried looking into it myself several times, but its really hard to find a source about it that isn't Scott Adams himself, someone supporting him also using entirely circumstantial arguments, or a media piece doing nothing more than reporting his allegations. – T.E.D. Feb 06 '17 at 22:30
  • @T.E.D. - the problem is that it seems to be done really intelligently, not a full ban (assuming it's intentional), making it **incredibly** difficult to prove due to algorithm not being public and thus not knowing expected behavior to test against. I'm tempted to message Adams and suggest specific testing strategies, but I don't actually use Twitter so my approaches would be very twitter-non-specific. – user5341 Feb 07 '17 at 21:19
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    @user5341 - No, its not. In my experience, the tweets I can't find are almost entirely random (other than the fact that they happen to be the one I'm looking for of course, damnit). My guess is that he's just experiencing observer bias. The ones he doesn't care about he doesn't go looking for later (thus noticing they aren't being shown to him). – T.E.D. Feb 07 '17 at 21:32
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    @T.E.D. - I haven't followed all details but my impression isn't that it's 1 user not seeing them but a large # of users. – user5341 Feb 07 '17 at 21:34
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    Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/53208/discussion-between-t-e-d-and-user5341). – T.E.D. Feb 07 '17 at 21:35

2 Answers2

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In short, No.

Mr. Adams' complaint mirrors a common accusation by conservatives and boils down to two points:

  1. "I am not getting the likes and engament I believe I should be getting."
  2. "This is the result of deliberate sabotage of the algorithm to unfairly suppress my speech."

The so-called "Twitter Files" and the "expose" by Weiss that are referenced in the other answer get touted around a lot as "proof" for this, even though the actual contents disagree:

Weiss characterized these practices as censorship and as evidence of shadow banning, which Twitter disputed, largely on the basis of its different definition of "shadow ban".[42] Twitter distinguished visibility filtering from shadow banning, which it defined as making "content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it."[42][41]

The documents Weiss discussed focused on individuals popular with the right-wing and suggested the moderation practices were politically motivated[39][41]—a long-standing claim among American conservatives,[42] which Twitter has denied.[38]

An internal study Twitter conducted in 2018 found its algorithms favored the political right.[41][43][44]

Wired and Slate described the policy by which moderators were unable to act on high-profile conservative accounts without first escalating to high-level management as "preferential treatment",[37][45] since this effectively limited Twitter's enforcement of their content policies on these accounts.[46]

Weiss did not reveal how many accounts overall were de-amplified nor the politics of those who were,[47] and this lack of context made it difficult to glean any conclusions on the matter.[41]

If anything, this suggests that rather than "shadow-banning", high profile conservatives were handled with proverbial kid gloves and permitted to post comments that would get other people suspended or banned.

Shadur
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  • Yes, that is why US Judge has issued ruling against state agents. Because there is no interference from the state. – paulj Jul 10 '23 at 23:52
  • You state "no" at the top, then proceed to provide evidence on how the answer is "yes". Twitter, by taking action that effectively reduces the views a tweet receives is a "yes" answer to the OP. – David S Jul 11 '23 at 15:23
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was there 'visibility filtering'

Yes, despite claims otherwise.

We do not shadow ban.

blog.twitter.com/

Weiss contended that "visibility filtering" was merely Twitter's in-house term for "shadow banning".

Ref: Twitter files (Wikipedia) and The free press

Was there ideological bias when it comes to content moderation?

The free press seems to say yes.

“They say they didn’t put their thumb on the scale,” Musk, who became CEO of Twitter in October, told The Free Press. “But they were pressing the thumb hard in favor of the left. If left, you could get away with death threats, and nothing would happen. If right, you could get suspended for retweeting a picture of a Trump rally.”

Other sources Gizmodo Forbes 1 and Forbes 2 dispute this claim.

pinegulf
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    The exact section you reference points out that Weiss' assertions were wrong - at best, a poor understanding of the facts; at worst, a deliberate misreading and partial release. – Shadur Jun 19 '23 at 09:04
  • @Shadur That's news to me. If you have better reference, I'm happy to take a look. – pinegulf Jun 19 '23 at 09:05
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    "An internal study Twitter conducted in 2018 found its algorithms favored the political right.[41][43][44] Wired and Slate described the policy by which moderators were unable to act on high-profile conservative accounts without first escalating to high-level management as "preferential treatment",[37][45] since this effectively limited Twitter's enforcement of their content policies on these accounts.[46]" – Shadur Jun 19 '23 at 09:06
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    That's *in the exact document you're referencing*. – Shadur Jun 19 '23 at 09:07
  • @Shadur I'm not following. The question is, roughly, 'are certain users held back', not 'are right-wing held back'. 2x Chapters at beginning seem to describe 'visibility filtering'. If that's not throttling, I don't know what is. – pinegulf Jun 19 '23 at 09:17
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    Scott's assertion was that Twitter *"throttles the tweets of any content that disagrees with their political views"*. – Shadur Jun 19 '23 at 09:21