Censorship and Respect

I'm the kind of person who has to understand how things work, especially if there is data. I can't help it. I've always taken things apart, changed conditions, watched for impacts, and tried to replicate. I didn't know this was "hacking" until fairly recently. It's just something I do.

As a Product Manager, I spent quite a bit of time studying SEO, mostly because the if we depended on the Marketing Director to do her job the product would've died. The more I fell into tuning the landing and product pages to maximize hits, the more fascinated I got in the data we were collecting about who visited. Admittedly I had the best-est of partners who shared my interest in feeding data back into our message. We were very successful. What the company viewed as a minor add-on product to get the Sales Rep's foot in the door accounted for over 85% of the web traffic.

I can't help but be equally interested in my Twitter account stats. It's not about monetizing. I actively review and Block ANY followers that are: selling more followers, T&A, or obnoxiously hawking their wares.

I just love seeing how well I can communicate and what people are interested in...

The first time I noticed an anomalous drop in Twitter impressions was last Fall. My husband commented, half joking, that it happened right after posting a less than favorable tweet about Twitter. It wasn't rude, but it was critical. In my world, criticism is how you make things better, and Twitter hasn't exactly been too well as a company.

After posting sunshine and rainbows for a couple of weeks, my stats went back to normal. Hmmm.....I kinda brushed it off, but have been frustrated but the glaring lack of information about how Twitter calculates the stats reported on the analytics dashboard.

Then I saw the very same inexplicable behavior after I posting my Ted Cruz-resembles-GrandPa-Munster tweet:

The number of impressions were up to 9,960 after 36 hours - and then stopped. Same number next morning. I thought that was weird. By that evening, the number of impressions for this tweet dropped 75%. So of course I took to Twitter.

I started gathering more data because now I had a pattern. In the course of researching the problem I bumped into a few articles about Twitter censoring authors via shadow bans. I was initially skeptical, so I decided to test. 

I typically see 30 - 40 impressions within the first hour, unless there are re-tweets, which was what happened with my Ted Cruz-as-Munster funny. Impressions are defined as simple how many unique timelines your tweet appears in. It doesn't mean anyone sees your tweet, they just have the opportunity. With 80+ followers and being on a few Lists, 30 - 40 impressions is a logical number.

But, after I posted the following tweet, impressions for that and any other post I made dropped to zero - regardless of the content:

Hmm. There may be merit to the shadow banning rumor. Next test. I decided to publish how I feel about Twitter censorship, if indeed that is what happened:

What's interesting is impressions remained zero, until the following tweet to .@Jack (Mr Twitter himself):

Within 4 hours, impressions on ALL my tweets started to increment, including the Ted Cruz-as-Munster offender. But still not exactly where I would expect the numbers to be.

I wanted to see if innocuous tweets would get me completely out of the dog house, so I over-participated in the 2BitTues game. Bingo. The oh-so-offending tweet is now over 15,000 impressions and here is my current 7-day stats:

CONCLUSIONS

I think shadow banning is very real, but maybe far more subtle than folks may realize. 

My guess is users report abuse to Twitter when they bump into content that they find offensive. Twitter probably has some kind of level of tolerance where if there are so many reports within a time period, they ban first and review later. Rather than something as insidious as Twitter employees shadow banning accounts, maybe it's just gangs that group report what they don't like - knowing whatever that golden threshold of silence is...

THE IRONY

While I am fairly well disgusted by the SJWs imposing their over-emotional expectations on other people, my reaction is to filter the bullshit rather than engage. Like, whatever.

The irony of all this is #TheTriggering would've never even entered my radar except for this experience.

Apparently, someone(s) can't take a joke - or criticism. 

So here's what I have to say: Fuck your labels. 

You are what you DO. You can't demand or expect respect. The very best you can do is give it. Respect is earned, and it will always elude you if that's what your goal is, instead of supporting a community, being dependable, helping folks out just because it really feels good to make a difference. You have to sincerely care about people to win their trust.