Twitter
Exposed
Project VeritasProject Veritas released a report on their undercover operations regarding Twitter which revealed, among other things, the extent to which Twitter engages in shadow banning. This came just under two years after sources confirmed to Breitbart that Twitter frequently shadow bans.
In the video report, former Twitter software engineer Abhinav Vadrevu explains shadow banning:
One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.
. . .
I definitely know Reddit does this, but I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.
The report contains numerous people associated with Twitter talking about the progress of shadow banning and how the platform goes about using it in different ways.
In another part of the video when talking with Pranay Singh (a Twitter engineer who works on Direct Messaging), the Project Veritas journalists ask about why Twitter won’t verify Julian Assange and why his account was briefly taken down a couple weeks prior. Singh says that he didn’t know the account was taken down, but that those types of actions are likely due to pressure from the US government, which casued the following exchange:
Project Veritas Journalist: Do you get requests from the government to take down celebrities?
Pranay Singh: Oh, all the f**king time.