After following Scott Adams for several months on Twitter, I noticed two days ago his posts suddenly stopped showing up in my timeline. I changed no settings. I altered nothing in my notifications. I follow only 28 accounts so there is no chance they got lost. Just, suddenly, no posts from Adams.
I know Adams is a tireless persuader. So, I went to his timeline and I saw over 200 posts by him *that day alone*.
How many were in my Twitter timeline? NONE.
Remember when the California electric companies artificially limited electricity generation and then price gouged citizens while cutting off their electricity sporadically? How did that feel?
You see, if a Twitter engineer with an SJW chip on his shoulder wanted to harm his political opposition, he could tweak the algorithm to perform “rolling blackouts” of the followers of certain key twitter accounts. It would come and go randomly, so it would be difficult to replicate, and so remain hidden from @twittersupport. But it would materially harm the key accounts’ messaging by preventing a certain percentage of their followers at any given time from seeing their posts – thus preventing followers from responding or liking posts to show support.
NOT ok, Twitter. And when it happens, we will keep telling you and those affected by it until it stops.
I don’t care if Twitter is shadowbanning on accident due to software bugs or if someone is doing this on purpose, because either way the resulting effect is the silencing of rightful speech. Tech companies are already under fire for SJW-friendly censorship and groupthink. But investors won’t care about excuses should Twitter’s brand take on an ominous neo-Orwellian shadow and make it even harder for them to make a profit.
Fix the issue, Twitter.
Parsing Persuasion 