I have a new plan

Whenever someone asks me (which they don't) why my blog is not more popular, I will tell them it's because of shadow-banning!

 Twitter: Setting the record straight on shadow banning

tl;dr version: "Twitter totally doesn't shadow-ban accounts, we just make up reasons why tweets from those accounts don't belong in your timeline. And those reasons totally have nothing to do with politics or ideology, it's all based on relevance. Because we totally know better than you what is relevant to you."

To give the devil xhir's¹ due, by their definition of "shadow banning" it's probably true; if you define shadow-banning as "making so that no one see's an account but the account owner", setting it so that an account never show in a timeline, but is still visible by clicking the account link, is not shadow banning.

But it completely subverts the point of a timeline, and is (I would argue), antithetical to the point of Twitter: A medium designed for short, (hopefully) pithy posts would seem to call for an automatic "loading" of posts, in chronological order. That self-righteous screed I linked above makes the claim that Twitter is interested in "conversation", yet they allow co-adherents of their leftist ideology to spew lies, hate, and calls for violence against their perceived opposition (and members of the oppositions family and social circle), while shutting down the accounts of those that criticize such behavior, and deciding for me what is relevant to my interests.

Which is, of course, par for the course on the left today; criticize, for example, Maxine Waters for calling on the left to attack members of President Trump's administration, down to anyone wearing a "MAGA" cap, and you are guilty of hate speech.

Now, Twitter is a private concern, and they make the rules whatever they want.

But this whole business of micturating on our extremities and alleging that it is precipitation² is bullshit.


1. No, that's not a typo, I'm mocking the modern predilection of the left to make up words to avoid using the common English-language pronouns that identify gender.
2. Stolen, appropriately enough, from a tweet. I forget who's tweet it was, but I think it was Dana Loesch. Or Molly Hemingway. Maybe it was Mary Katherine Ham. Pretty sure...