You were warned. Now it begins.
Since the implementation of Twitter's new algorithmic timeline back in February of this year, conservatives, libertarians and anti-establishment dissidents alike have been waiting for the social media platform to interfere in the current U.S. election cycle. Now it seems that there is clear evidence of Twitter censoring the current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.
A tweet sent from Trump's account at 3:04 PM EDT yesterday is not visible from his timeline, even when showing "Tweets and replies." That message included a video wherein Trump declared that "the establishment and special interests are absolutely killing our country."At the time of this writing, the tweet is still publicly accessible via a direct link and thus has not been deleted either by Twitter or by someone operating on the Trump account.
This archive.is link has a copy of the timeline taken before this article was published which clearly shows the tweet not appearing where it should be — between a tweet sent at 12:10 PM EDT and one sent at 3:27 PM EDT; it is possible that the tweet may be reintroduced to the timeline in order to hide the manipulation.
Today it's one Trump tweet, tomorrow it will be you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:55AM
A search for "Twitter shadowban" revealed Adventures in Twitter Censorship [cryptome.org] (lightweight 4 pages PDF, dated Oct 18 2015).
On the plus side, the Trump's twitter incident added to the linked may show this story is not about Trump.
On the negative side, I have a hunch that is actually not Twitter that drives the censorship but some letter agencies - in which case this story might as well read "Spooks now actively interfere with the democratic process"
The linked story describes a similar incident [vice.com] happening to Paul Dietrich (and investigative journo involved in researching the drone papers [theintercept.com]).
Some excepts below, but do read the 4 pages I linked to get your own opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @10:39AM
and on this website: New Twitter Features Re-ignite Censorship Concerns [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Wednesday April 27 2016, @09:07PM
I have a hunch that is actually not Twitter that drives the censorship but some letter agencies
Certainly possible, but hardly the only possibility. Anybody dealing with large distributed systems has had problems where data propagation is incorrect or delayed. For example, at a previous job if I gave my account some permissions in Active Directory, I could immediately do stuff on a server in London, but if I tried the same thing on a server in LA it would take a few hours for the change to propagate to the local AD server. It was hardly that the NSA was preventing my account from doing what I wanted, and all a consequence of the fact that perfect replication of distributed data in perfect sync is pretty much impossible, especially with a rate of change as high as all the tweets in the world, and a userbase that is globally very widely distributed.