On Saturday (June 17), billionaire businessman Elon Musk conceded that ‘Twitter shadowban’ is real and that the Twitter team did not know that such a thing was embedded in the Source code.
He made the revelations while reacting to a popular Twitter handle (@TitterDaily), which informed that the engineers at the micro-blogging site have recently found ‘shadowbans’ buried deep in Twitter code.
It said, “Just last week they found a measure that stopped accounts assigned a low ‘Reputation score’ from trending. This shadowban even applied to Elon’s account and prevented his tweets from trending.”
True. So many skeletons in the closet. No one at the company knew this code existed.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 17, 2023
“The Reputation score applied to accounts was simply based on how many times an account was reported. This wasn’t relative to follower count – so anyone with a large following would be hit,” the Twitter handle emphasised.
While reacting to the tweet, Elon Musk acknowledged, “True. So many skeletons in the closet. No one at the company knew this code existed.” On Friday (June 16), the billionaire businessman vowed to increase transparency on social media.
He assured to introduce a feature, which would show users whether the Twitter code had shadowbanned them and the reason for the same. “If your account is in any way affected by the Twitter system, then you can see it clearly,” Musk remarked.
Elon Musk confirmed that Twitter is working on a feature which will allow users to see their account status.
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 17, 2023
It will be great because users can check themselves if they are shadowbanned or not & will also get to know the reason for the same. pic.twitter.com/B2w5s7Tpaj
Earlier this month, he spoke to the popular satirical website ‘The Babylon Bee’ and said, “Last week, we discovered a hidden layer of censorship, written in 2012…Censorship is maybe the wrong word…It would basically suppress…It had like a list of words…”
@elonmusk reveals he’s still uncovering hidden censorship layers in Twitter’s code. pic.twitter.com/b4B1oBiSZU
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2023
Elon Musk calls ‘fact checkers’ liars and biased
On June 13, a news report emerged which claimed that in the USA, nearly 100% of the fact-checkers’ contribution went to the Democrats and that they had a liberal bias.
“The study reviewed political donations over the past four election cycles. $22,580 of the $22,683 in political donations went to Democrats. Only three, obviously very small donations went to any Republicans!”, the report claimed.
Responding to this news, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, tweeted that all fact-checkers were biased. “The so-called fact-checkers are huge liars and incredibly biased”, he emphasised.
