#ShadowBanning

[girlinafairytale]

i posted three stories in a span of 5 minutes on Instagram. the first story has a mention of israel while the second was about colonialism and the third was a quote by james baldwin. my account is private and all my followers are allowed to see my stories. yet the first story got shadowbanned. only a fraction of my followers can see it. why? is it because israel is mentioned?

many public accounts posting about palestine are either getting shadowbanned or aren't able to post altogether. many of these accounts aren't able to send or recieve messages, check their followers or following, post stories and posts.

meta is complicit in silencing palestinians and those who speak for palestine. they don't want us too see what israel is doing.

so go, see the atrocities commited by the occupation and remember them. remember the suffering of the palestinians, remember the beheaded babies, remember the women giving birth without medical aid, remember the faces of the starving children, remember the hospitals they blew up. don't let them change the story 20 years from now and downplay the sufferings of the palestinians.

above all, don't stop talking about palestine.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech

The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse. This week, it’s the false dichotomy between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach,” that is, the debate over whether a platform should override your explicit choices about what you want to see:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3849331-musk-meets-twitter-staff-freedom-of-reach-new-ideas-on-human-verification

It’s wild that we’re still having this fight. It is literally the first internet fight! The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between “Bellheads” (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and “Netheads” (who believed that services should be provided and consumed “at the edge”):

https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

The Bellheads grew out of the legacy telco system, which was committed to two principles: universal service and monetization. The large telcos were obliged to provide service to everyone (for some value of “everyone”), and in exchange, they enjoyed a monopoly over the people they connected to the phone system.

That meant that they could decide which services and features you had, and could ask the government to intervene to block competitors who added services and features they didn’t like. They wielded this power without restraint or mercy, targeting, for example, the Hush-A-Phone, a cup you stuck to your phone receiver to muffle your speech and prevent eavesdropping:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone

They didn’t block new features for shits and giggles, though — the method to this madness was rent-extraction. The iron-clad rule of the Bell System was that anything that improved on the basic service had to have a price-tag attached. Every phone “feature” was a recurring source of monthly revenue for the phone company — even the phone itself, which you couldn’t buy, and had to rent, month after month, year after year, until you’d paid for it hundreds of times over.

This is an early and important example of “predatory inclusion”: the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly, parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/predatory-inclusion-a-long-view-of-the-race-for-profit/

It wasn’t just the phone that came with an unlimited price-tag: everything you did with the phone was also a la carte, like the bananas-high long-distance charges, or even per-minute charges for local calls. Features like call waiting were monetized through recurring monthly charges, too.

Remember when Caller ID came in and you had to pay $2.50/month to find out who was calling you before you answered the phone? That’s a pure Bellhead play. If we applied this principle to the internet, then you’d have to pay $2.50/month to see the “from” line on an email before you opened it.

Bellheads believed in “smart” networks. Netheads believed in what David Isenberg called “The Stupid Network,” a ��dumb pipe” whose only job was to let some people send signals to other people, who asked to get them:

https://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html

This is called the End-to-End (E2E) principle: a network is E2E if it lets anyone receive any message from anyone else, without a third party intervening. It’s a straightforward idea, though the spam wars brought in an important modification: the message should be consensual (DoS attacks, spam, etc don’t count).

The degradation of the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman) meant the end of end-to-end. If you’re a Youtuber, Tiktoker, tweeter, or Facebooker, the fact that someone explicitly subscribed to your feed does not mean that they will, in fact, see your feed.

The platforms treat your unambiguous request to receive messages from others as mere suggestions, a “signal” to be mixed into other signals in the content moderation algorithm that orders your feed, mixing in items from strangers whose material you never asked to see.

There’s nothing wrong in principal with the idea of a system that recommends items from strangers. Indeed, that’s a great way to find people to follow! But “stuff we think you’ll like” is not the same category as “stuff you’ve asked to see.”

Why do companies balk at showing you what you’ve asked to be shown? Sometimes it’s because they’re trying to be helpful. Maybe their research, or the inferences from their user surveillance, suggests that you actually prefer it that way.

But there’s another side to this: a feed composed of things from people is fungible. Theoretically, you could uproot that feed from one platform and settle it in another one — if everyone you follow on Twitter set up an account on Mastodon, you could use a tool like Movetodon to refollow them there and get the same feed:

https://www.movetodon.org/

A feed that is controlled by a company using secret algorithms is much harder for a rival to replicate. That’s why Spotify is so hellbent on getting you to listen to playlists, rather than albums. Your favorite albums are the same no matter where you are, but playlists are integrated into services.

But there’s another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

That’s when a company captures an audience inside a walled garden and then extracts value from creators as a condition of reaching them, even when the audience requests the creator’s work. With Spotify, that manifests as payola, where creators have to pay for inclusion on playlists. Spotify uses playlists to manipulate audiences into listening to sound-alikes, silently replacing the ambient artists that listeners tune in to hear with work-for-hire musicians who aren’t entitled to royalties.

Facebook’s payola works much the same: when you publish a post on Facebook, you have to pay to boost it if you want it to reach the people who follow you — that is, the people who signed up to see what you post. Facebook may claim that it does this to keep its users’ feeds “uncluttered” but that’s a very thin pretense. Though you follow friends and family on Facebook, your feed is weighted to accounts willing to cough up the payola to reach you.

The “uncluttering” excuse wears even thinner when you realize that there’s no way to tell a platform: “This isn’t clutter, show it to me every time.” Think of how the cartel of giant email providers uses the excuse of spam to block mailing lists and newsletters that their users have explicitly signed up for. Those users can fish those messages out of their spam folders, they can add the senders to their address books, they can write an email rule that says, “If sender is X, then mark message as ‘not spam’” and the messages still go to spam:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

One sign of just how irredeemably stupid the online free expression debate is that we’re arguing over stupid shit like whether unsolicited fundraising emails from politicians should be marked as spam, rather than whether solicited, double-opt-in newsletters and mailing lists should be:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-committee-sues-google-over-email-spam-filters/

When it comes to email, the stuff we don’t argue about is so much more important than the stuff we do. Think of how email list providers blithely advertise that they can tell you the “open rate” of the messages that you send — which means that they embed surveillance beacons (tracking pixels) in every message they send:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-took-over-the-web/

Sending emails that spy on users is gross, but the fucking disgusting part is that our email clients don’t block spying by default. Blocking tracking pixels is easy as hell, and almost no one wants to be spied on when they read their email! The onboarding process for webmail accounts should have a dialog box that reads, “Would you like me to tell creepy randos which emails you read?” with the default being “Fuck no!” and the alternative being “Hurt me, Daddy!”

If email providers wanted to “declutter” your inbox, they could offer you a dashboard of senders whose messsages you delete unread most of the time and offer to send those messages straight to spam in future. Instead they nonconsensually intervene to block messages and offer no way to override those blocks.

When it comes to recommendations, companies have an unresolvable conflict of interest: maybe they’re interfering with your communications to make your life better, or maybe they’re doing it to make money for their shareholders. Sorting one from the other is nigh impossible, because it turns on the company’s intent, and it’s impossible to read product managers’ minds.

This is intrinsic to platform capitalism. When platforms are getting started, their imperative is to increase their user-base. To do that, they shift surpluses to their users — think of how Amazon started off by subsidizing products and deliveries.

That lured in businesses, and shifted some of that surplus to sellers — giving fat compensation to Kindle authors and incredible reach to hard goods sellers in Marketplace. More sellers brought in more customers, who brought in more sellers.

Once sellers couldn’t afford to leave Amazon because of customers, and customers couldn’t afford to leave Amazon because of sellers, the company shifted the surplus to itself. It imposed impossible fees on sellers — Amazon’s $31b/year “advertising” business is just payola — and when sellers raised prices to cover those fees, Amazon used “Most Favored Nation” contracts to force sellers to raise prices everywhere else.

The enshittification of Amazon — where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones — is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

That same enshittification is on every platform, and “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” is just a way of saying, “Now that you’re stuck here, we’re going to enshittify your experience.”

Because while it’s hard to tell if recommendations are fair or not, it’s very easy to tell whether blocking end-to-end is unfair. When a person asks for another person to send them messages, and a third party intervenes to block those messages, that is censorship. Even if you call it “freedom of reach,” it’s still censorship.

For creators, interfering with E2E is also wage-theft. If you’re making stuff for Youtube or Tiktok or another platform and that platform’s algorithm decides you’ve broken a rule and therefore your subscribers won’t see your video, that means you don’t get paid.

It’s as if your boss handed you a paycheck with only half your pay in it, and when you asked what happened to the other half, your boss said, “You broke some rules so I docked your pay, but I won’t tell you which rules because if I did, you might figure out how to break them without my noticing.”

Content moderation is the only part of information security where security-through-obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

That’s why content moderation algorithms are a labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

We’re at the tail end of a ghastly, 15-year experiment in neo-Bellheadism, with the big platforms treating end-to-end as a relic of a simpler time, rather than as “an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.”

The post-Twitter platforms like Mastodon and Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/08/locus-of-individuation/#publish-then-filter

This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-free-instagram-feed/

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new “online safety” rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/

The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses:

Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see;

Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers;

Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms;

Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties;

Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair:

https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

The wholly artificial distinction between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach” is just more self-serving nonsense and the only reason we’re talking about it is that a billionaire dilettante would like to create chokepoints so he can extract payola from his users and meet his debt obligations to the Saudi royal family.

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

William Shaw Antliff (modified) https://www.macleans.ca/history/this-canadian-private-wrote-and-saved-hundreds-of-letters-during-the-first-world-war/

Public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Canada#Posthumous_works

[Image ID: A handwritten letter from a WWI soldier that has been redacted by military censors; the malevolent red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey has burned through the yellowing paper.]

[shinsources-archived]

The reason I'm asking this is because of a post made by @changes as seen here. There is a specific part under the ONGOING section that goes as such:

We are aware that some folks are hitting rate limit while using a VPN.

I, myself, didn't know this was a thing but I'm also not surprised that it's happening tbh. The reason for this is because of all the bullcrap I've gone through over the past couple of years while using a VPN. So please vote, reblog this, and tell me your stories about everything that has happened to you on here while using a VPN. I want as many people as possible to vote because we shouldn't have stupid things happen because we care about our privacy.

[shiverandqueeef]

perhaps it's just the result of growing up in a country that essentially weaponizes it's own 'international nice guy' persona to blind the general populace to our own social ills and culpability in literal war crimes, but i do sometimes wonder if we're not buying in a little too comfortably inre tumblr's reputation of (hilarious) incompetency.

and i'm thinking about this bc of the onslaught of new users convinced they've been shadowbanned; only in that case, i think we can agree the issue is much much more likely to be the result of a janky bot-flagging system and not a site-wide deep-state conspiracy to censor teenagers hot takes and discourse on whether or not bisexuals are allowed to call themselves gay

but still. tumblr is a social media platform trying to make itself profitable and idk i just think that maybe believing so firmly in the near mythological status of tumblr's incompetence is Not Good and could result in the userbase remaining willfully ignorant to any strides tumblr makes towards becoming a capitalistic hell(net)scape

only ofc i don't actually understand enough about How Websites Work to know if this is anything, really.

[marcogiovenale]

i hope someone will sue facebook for its strenuous shadowbanning of posts related to palestine

I hope someone will sue Facebook for its strenuous shadowbanning of posts related to #Palestine https://www.facebook.com/differx/posts/pfbid02qcb56MzbBsn91EcfENmwwWRCfED7U5dPrSf6DP9Kt1GxtRnnm93YF15bRFsmrwRAl

[bauliya]

isn’t it weird how palestine/gaza/israel keeps disappearing from the trending list even though the 1000+ people I follow keep constantly posting about it

[a-rogue-tiddy-bot]

Let's play a game of Am I shadowbanned again?

[presidentstalkeyes]

Question: is there a way to check if I've been shadowbanned? I can't send PMs to anyone and my posts don't show up in search results, which would explain why they only seem to get engagement if a follower happens to reblog them. Also, how do I get unshadowbanned?

[correctopinionhaver]

Welcome to Shadowban Park

🎵 🦖🦖🦕🦕🦖🦕🦖🦖🎶

[successkeepsspittin]

PSA: I joined mastodon because the algorithms on other social media sites were preventing me from reaching my fans via shadow banning. I'm not looking for hand outs just for the effort I put in to matter. #artist #hiphop #rapper #juggalo #juggalos #algorithm #algorithms #Shadowbanning #shadowbanned #successkeepsspittin #mastodon https://www.instagram.com/p/CoGpfiLr5QT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[tornadoquest]

Tornado Quest Top Science Links For December 10 - 17, 2022 #science #weather #climate #climatechange #astronomy #drought #winter

Tornado Quest Top Science Links For December 10 – 17, 2022 #science #weather #climate #climatechange #astronomy #drought #winter

Greetings everyone! I hope this week’s post finds all of you doing well during this holiday season. There are several interesting reads to go over and we’ll continue with winter weather safety information…so let’s get started. Photo by Tobias Bjørkli via pexels.com Do you think you’ve been “shadowbanned” on Twitter? Here’s how to find out. Keeping your distance from misinformation,…

[everythingwasnormalhere]

pls rb if you think cuddling doesn't have to be s3xual

im tryna prove a point to my bf's mother help me out

[moontyger]

Don’t say ‘vote’: How Instagram hides your political posts

If you’ve suspected that you’re yelling into a void about the election on Instagram, Facebook or Threads, it might not be your imagination, either. Downplaying politics is a business and political strategy for Meta, the social media giant. And users just have to accept it.

Consider a wider study by the advocacy group Accountable Tech, which quantified the audience drop for five prominent liberal Instagram accounts, including the Human Rights Campaign and Feminist, that post almost entirely about politics. Over 10 weeks this spring, their average audiences fell 65 percent.

And it’s not just Instagram: Only one of six social media giants would tell The Washington Post whether you can use the word “vote” without having a post suppressed.

It matters because social media has a profound impact on how people see themselves, their communities and the world. One in five American adults regularly get their news from Instagram — more than TikTok, X or Reddit — according to the Pew Research Center.

It could leave swaths of Americans wondering why we aren’t hearing as much about the election. And less likely to vote, too.

Meta doesn’t deny that it’s suppressing politics and social issues. But as my deep dive into Mrs. Frazzled’s Instagram account shows, it has left users in the lurch — and won’t give straight answers about when, and how, it reduces the volume on what we have to say.

...

The hatchet fell on Instagram this year. In a February blog post, Meta said it would no longer “proactively recommend content about politics,” including topics “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.”

Translation: Meta tightened the reins over what to put in your feed and Explore tab, specifically from accounts you don’t already follow.

As part of the shift, Instagram also opted everyone into a new setting to have it recommend less political content from accounts you don’t follow. It did not alert users to this inside the Instagram app. (If you don’t want a sanitized feed on Instagram, Facebook or Threads, I’ve got instructions for how to change your settings below.)

This is not exactly “censorship” — anyone can still post about politics, and people who already follow you can still see it. That’s how Taylor Swift reached her 283 million followers with an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

But it is a form of what creators and politicians have long called “shadowbanning”: reducing the reach of certain kinds of content without being transparent about when it’s happening. Political campaigns, too, have been scrambling to find alternative ways to break through.

I sent Meta questions about how it determines what to reduce. It wouldn’t detail what it means by “political and social issues” beyond content potentially related to “things like laws, elections, or social topics.���

...

How do its automated systems make these calls? Would mentioning Taylor Swift count as political? What about coconuts? Can it make a distinction between voting information and partisan bickering?

I also asked Meta for a list of forbidden keywords, after I noticed that Fodor’s use of “vote” in captions correlated to a steep audience drop. Meta wouldn’t share that, either, saying thousands of factors affect how content is ranked and recommended.

Meta put a slightly finer point on “social topics” in a statement to The Post earlier in the year, defining it as “content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime.”

But that definition could rule out wide swaths of the lived human experience, including people talking about their family in the Middle East or simply being gay or trans.

“These are such integral parts of some people’s identities and livelihoods — Meta’s gone so far as to limit their capability to talk about who they are and what they care about,” says Zach Praiss, Accountable Tech’s campaigns director, who led the organization’s research.

.................................................................................................................

How to increase the amount of political content you get recommended

Instagram: Open the mobile app, go to Settings, then scroll down to Content preferences, then Political content, and choose “Don’t limit political content from the people you don’t follow”

Facebook: Go to the Menu then Settings & privacy, then Preferences, then Content preferences, then Manage defaults, then change Political content to “Show more”

Threads: Open the mobile app, go to Settings, then Account, then Political content, then toggle on Suggest political content

[omanxl1]

Cutting The Corner (Part Eight)

 On this Throwback Thursday  / Thankful Thursday? you can catch us out here cutting the corner moving on to the next. Influenced by this Full Moon in Aries? knowing damn well some wouldn’t be fair with that and these making the sport complex. Brotha O? sick of it, he moved on to the next! the starship Avalon is cutting the corner disappearing into the galaxy. Playing this like Lakeside check…

[marcogiovenale]

aj+ about how meta censors and bans posts about palestine