The war over the free flow of information has escalated…
Ed Dowd, Former manager of BlackRock’s $15 billion Capital Appreciation Fund has a relatively small but influential Twitter following, ranging from Financial industry all-stars to prominent media personalities. Since leaving BlackRock, Dowd has shifted gears – moving to Hawaii to launch his own equity fund from the luxury of his volcano-adjacent compound, while helping his wife develop a rapidly growing business of her own. He’s also quite the subversive Twitter user – known for spotlighting MSM hypocrisy, roasting progressive politicians, and doling out sharp-witted rebukes of Ivory Tower overlords.
In early February, Dowd began noticing some odd behavior occurring with his Twitter account; throughout the day he would gain followers as he tweeted, while late at night followers were disappearing! He began keeping track, and though it wasn’t happening every night, it penciled out to around half a percent of his followers each time it happened, effectively capping his audience. Ed had questions; why was it almost always the same number of people? Who un-follows someone in the middle of the night? Considering most of Dowd’s followers are in North America, the un-followers were likely asleep when it was happening. The logical conclusion was that Twitter had been actively pruning Ed’s audience to limit his growth on the platform – but keep reading, it gets better.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has throttled, censored, or banned conservatives who speak their mind. Documentarian, author, and noted Trump supporter Mike Cernovich (@cernovich) tweeted about his own fan base evaporating around the same time as Dowd began experiencing the un-follows:
Every day people are auto unfollowed. My real followe count closer to 1 million. pic.twitter.com/r38aSjtZDM
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) February 9, 2017
Others have noted the same phenomenon:
Twitter censorship! They're deleting follows, not allowed over 20.5k. Images marked sensitive. They must have voted #Hillary
— Deplorable Tim ?? (@Timtravels007) March 19, 2017
In June of 2016, Twitter was accused of the same tactic against conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero), shortly before he was was banned by the platform following a feud with SNL’s Leslie Jones in which Milo called her “Barely Literate.”
If u were following @Nero please check to see if you still are-@twitter censorship at work as many of his followers got switched to unfollow
— caren (@carengoodrich) June 15, 2016
Found another 'unfollow' that I DID NOT UNFOLLOW —> @Ayaan Nor would I have done. Added to list try to prevent #Twitter #Censorship antics
— sal (@tevet) June 18, 2016
And now it’s Retweets too!
After Ed Dowd noticed Twitter capping his follower count, he started paying closer attention to his tweets. Monday morning, Dowd made a decidedly subversive tweet pointing out that the NSA and CIA are “wiretapping” the entire country via continuously archived data collection – a story which Wired magazine broke in 2006 and gained tremendous clarity through the acts of whistleblower Edward Snowden.
When Dowd checked his twitter feed hours after sending the tweet, he saw that it had accumulated 13 Retweets and 38 Likes. Given the subject matter, he decided to take a screenshot. Lo and behold, upon reloading the tweet five minutes later, Dowd discovered that 11 retweets had mysteriously vanished!
Either eleven people decided to un-retweet Dowd within five minutes of each other, or Twitter decided to censor a tweet critical of the government by limiting it’s visibility. Thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of people connected to the eleven un-retweeted people were no longer able to see Dowd’s tweet.
About three hours later the tweet was up to 44 likes, and the retweets had climbed from 2 back to 12. Time for another screenshot…
A little over an hour later, Dowd’s tweet had once again been manipulated – dropping from 12 retweets to 6. Now it’s at 7.
Twitter suppression algos still un-retweeting your retweets.Notice my iPhone time at top of screenshots. 12 to 6 in about an hour. #nsa #cia pic.twitter.com/JipofpmwNN
— Ed (@DowdEdward) March 21, 2017
Outrageous!
While Twitter is a public company free to censor their own users, one wonders at what point the platform might be considered a public good, subject to the 1st amendment? After all, Social Media has become increasingly integral to human connectivity – not only serving to enhance casual communication, but also as an incredibly powerful tool which can reveal and disseminate truth on a massive scale.
For example, the sheer volume of the information made available in 2016 by Wikileaks was astounding. There was no table of contents – just raw emails. The symbiosis of investigative efforts between message boards like Reddit and 4chan would have just rattled around in their respective echo chambers were it not for Twitter and Facebook serving as lightning fast conduits for information to jump out of the “hive mind” and into the mainstream knowledgebase – “red pilling” any and all seeking the truth. In short, the free flow of information is why Donald Trump is President – while the technocratic left have been decimated by their own inventions. This is why the MSM is fighting tooth and nail to brand and censor anything outside of the mainstream narrative as “fake news,” alongside Social Media platforms which continue to implement methods limiting the free speech of those who don’t Obey. For now, however, they have lost control.
Until and unless something is done to allow the free flow of information to thrive on platforms like Twitter, all we can do is try and shed light on the problem until it’s reflected in their share price and user base. If nothing changes (or the problem gets worse) – we must either live with types of censorship Ed Dowd, Mike Cernovich, Milo, and countless others have been subject to – or leave for greener yet smaller pastures such as gab.ai in the hopes that as they will continue to remain tolerant of divergent opinions as they grow.
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My account used to get 400-600 new followers per mo like clockwork. But the last two months I’ll be lucky to get 250. They’re definitely doing something.
I have come to believe that $TWTR exists not to profit directly but passively fund through ideas the causes of the left. The platform is incredibly valuable beyond EPS valuation. Add to the situation a PT CEO ……….
I dont get the significance of “un-follow” ! Is it not just counter? Who cares what # if content of tweet unchanged. So what is this about? A popularity contest?
(note: I have never had/used twitter, fakebook, etc.)
Sacrilege, you only see tweets from followers unless you go looking for them… an unfollow means your audience shrinks and message is suppressed while twitter pretends to be a platform for free speech.
Twitter also has an algorithm that shows “what you missed” when you were away” which would totally be easy to manipulate as well.
Sac
It’s about dissemination of information. When RTs are revoked, the info that was shared is too. They’re controlling information.
got it – a follow is like your email distribution list but people add themselves on it and then one msg from you is copied to all followers on that list.
I have been stuck at 5k followers for about two years now, and very recently have noticed that my tweets are getting abnormally fewer likes and RT’s. I have been on Twitter for about 6 years and can confidently say that my entire follower list is not seeing all of my tweets.
So, I created 3 new accounts, two of which I use to troll the absolute sh*t out of the left – from the left.
One is a Bernie Supporter that hates Hillary Supporters.
The other is a Hillary Supporter that hates Bernie Supporters.
Both are woke af, naturally.
chess unfollowed me on instagram yesterday. I figured it was probably just the finalization of the divorce….but now I’m wondering if it could have been a deep-state algo??
Related …from NYTimes Brief:
Business
• AT&T and Johnson & Johnson are among several companies that plan to pull their ads from YouTube and other Google properties, amid concerns that the company was not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material like hate speech.
Funny thing actually, Facebook is activley doing the same thing with the “Angry” (like) thing.
I’ve spent three weeks testing by making certain ads and posts as “Angry” by me, only to find later on in the day the exact same post/ad is reset back to no emotion.
I wonder why?
There is an additional explanation for one’s Twitter retweets being pruned after the fact that has nothing to do with political or ideological censorship as a motivating factor.
Many accounts on social media (up to 50% on some platforms) are automated bot accounts that repost subject matter based on keywords and automated searches. Social media platforms have active measures to prune posts from accounts that historically are followed by large percentages of bots who in turn repost to a large percentage of other bots (bots gather other bot followers, deliberately). This is done when the percentage of real human readers vs the percentage of non-human readers in the chain of reposts is below some calculated critical value, statistically speaking. To minimize the negative effect of automated bots on the ecosystem, reposts to audiences of mostly bots talking to mostly other bots are removed to disincent bot operators from abusing the platform: it adds significant operating dollars to support the additional non-human traffic, so it’s a big cost savings. So, the recent rise of political bots means both hard-right and hard-left posters will have their reposts to accounts primarily read only by other bots pruned off. This makes your repost numbers more accurate, not less so, in that they more likely reflect reposts by actual humans to other actual humans. While you might think your individual numbers aren’t accurate, and maybe your account is unique enough that you are a special case, at scale the data science here is spot-on. It isn’t you; you’re just hanging with company that skews the numbers of actual humans.
And, yes, social media platforms don’t want to disincent advertisers and mainstream visitors: advertisers don’t want to pay for sponsored posts shown to bots who will never buy their product. As far as lots of angry or grumpy or other negative emotions attached to a post go, no, social media platforms don’t want that on their site as it turns off mainstream readers and would cause the platform to lose visitors and then ad dollars as a result. That’s a legit business concern, it happens, it’s measurable, so some may be rate-limiting a user’s ability to post negative emotions in a single day or to a max number of posts in a day. If you are unhappy with a limit to your freedom of expression, there are other niche sites available, and there’s always the choice of a personal blog where you can freely express yourself.
Mainstream sites like Twitter and Facebook by and large aren’t pruning for political or ideological reasons. Maybe there’s a rogue employee somewhere doing something, but nobody’s getting marching orders to go do so at a corporate or department level. I know; I’ve been there.
Bret, interesting and plausible theory – especially in light of the recent report on up to 15% (48 Million) TWTR accounts suspected of being bots.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-accounts-could-be-bots-says-study.html
That said, I haven’t noticed (and couldn’t find via search) similar issues with famous liberals’ accounts. It seems to be targeted at conservatives, though maybe the bots are too?
I got thousands of followers whiile I was using the #ImWithHer hashtag leading up to the election. Every tweet got tons of RTs and likes, even though it was tongue in cheek and frankly some of them were too stupid to really be RTed
Bots. I think, especially in the political world, bots are used very often to auto-RT and auto-follow people, and then Twitter cracks down on the bot behavior (resulting in their RTs disappearing). So I have to agree with Bret here….but that doesn’t explain the automatic unfollowing that happens in real user accounts….which I have never had happen to me that I know of.
Andy,
The thing about Dowd’s tweet is that it had no hashtags. Maybe he hit the trifecta with “CIA / NSA / Wiretap” and non-TWTR bots caught on without the #?
Brilliant strategy using #ImWithHer btw.
I’m an etymologist and I leave politics out of my work, but it’s obvious that Google and Twitter are censoring me. For example, at each holiday, I do historical etymologies of jokes, puns, riddles, quotations, foods and more. The best work anywhere. I have appropriate hashtags, there are about 100 million Twitter users each day, and then I get almost no hits at all? How? If you Twttier search #jokes and #puns with #StPatricksDay or #PancakeDay or #ValentinesDay or #NewYearsDay or #Christmas or #Thanksgiving or #Halloween, does my work come up at all to any of you?
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/24/lawmakers-call-on-fbi-to-help-find-string-missing-black-girls-in-washington.html
This is for the Pedogate deniers.
Have checked if same tweet count stuff is happening to “liberal” accounts too?
The whole tweet thing except for biz purposes is loopy but there shouldn’t be any censorship.