To many, the Internet is seen as a largely unregulated open marketplace of ideas and speech, where absent any outright violations of law, violations of website terms of service (TOS), or statements made in a directly dangerous and threatening way, communication between individuals occurs without censorship or interference by governments or corporations.
Of course, there are times when comments, posts, statements or uploads get taken down – usually for violating TOS – on sites like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. But amid the flurry of interest in Internet privacy, government surveillance and online harassment issues, some disturbing new trends have emerged in the world of social media.
Twitter’s shifting groundrules
On Sunday, Oct. 18, Paul Dietrich, a contributor to the surveillance watchdog and transparency advocacy site Cryptome, published this PDF blog post entitled “Adventures in Twitter Censorship.” The post, which was quickly picked up by Internet message and image boards and spread throughout anonymous online communities, made waves because it alleged that Twitter recently implemented a new tool which Dietrich claimed allows moderators and administrators to quietly – and subversively – censor Twitter posts without alerting the user or its broader user base.
The practice, known as “shadowbanning,” has been regularly used for some time on sites like Reddit. When a social media user is shadowbanned, their content gets hidden from view from all but themselves. They are still able to post content, leave comments and participate in discussions, but their contributions have become invisible to others. Since moderators on a given board or platform don’t inform the user that their content has been shadowbanned, their posts simply appear to go unanswered or disregarded.
This was the case for Dietrich who, after tweeting out a news article related to The Intercept’s recently released “drone papers” leak, awoke to find a number of Twitter notifications suggesting that his tweet had gotten traffic by way of a retweet by the well known Internet activist Jacob Appelbaum. However, upon logging into Twitter to check the activity, Dietrich noted only a “favorite” by Appelbaum, not an actual retweet. Bewildered that a simple “favorite” could garner such traction in Twitter, he checked to see if other tweets might have been affected as well. One instance jumped out at him from a tweet he’s made the day prior, which included the hashtag #dronepapers and was searchable now only through a quote made by another user. Dietrich’s original tweet was altogether missing.
His curiosity piqued, Dietrich switched web browsers, attempting to run the same search for his #dronepapers tweet using Tor, an anonymous web browser that allows users to circumvent corporate and government filters that might otherwise block content. What he found when he logged in with Tor was that Twitter had shadowbanned his tweets to users in the U.S.
Dietrich reached out to some friends and discovered that the masking of his #dronepapers tweets had been surprisingly selective: rather than being hidden across the entire web, the tweets were available in fact in Germany, just not in the United States. The content in question has since been restored and made available for U.S. consumption, but Dietrich’s story is only one of many cases that bear similar resemblance at Twitter.
Suspicions grow
On Aug. 30, a Youtuber going by the name LeoPirate released a video entitled “To Catch A Predator: @srhbutts #FreeEncyclopediaDramatica,” in which he explored the sordid past of one Sarah Nyberg, a confessed pedophileand celebrated champion of online “social justice.” A month later, despite verifying his sources for the video, LeoPirate found his Twitter account permanently banned.
While some suspect LeoPirate’s ban was a result of Twitter administrators’ ideological leanings in support of Nyberg – the hashtag #IStandWithButts was quickly taken over by users opposed to what they claimed was defense of a pedophile – questions regarding Twitter’s commitment to free speech continue to grow.
Amid the expansive array of new tools being rolled out to combat what the U.N. has described as “cyber violence” – in other words, mean or negative comments online – Twitter also appears keen to take the lead combating “abusive” or “harmful” Internet behavior. In a recent statement, Twitter explained the creation and implementation of censorship devices thus:
“We have begun to test a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach. This feature takes into account a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a Tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive. It will not affect your ability to see content that you’ve explicitly sought out, such as Tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content. This feature does not take into account whether the content posted or followed by a user is controversial or unpopular.'”
It cannot and should not be assumed that tools, which help shield sensitive individuals from speech they might find hurtful or offensive, will not be or have not already been co-opted for the purpose of limiting the spread of what some may regard as “harmful” ideas or opinions. As we continue down this track of apparent censorship by one of the freest and most effective social media tools of our generation, take note: it may not be long before Twitter goes from banning users who dress in the online clothes of activists, to censoring genuine activists on national security or other grounds.
Once again, society finds itself at a crossroads between free expression, with all the dirt and peril it presents, and a false sense of safety and security at the hands of censorious powers who assure us they’re acting in our best interest. What initially seems a well meaning effort could, down the line, be ruinous to the most fundamental principles of civil liberty.
