Soumyadipta Banerjee
Daily O, India
Twitter admitted that it has been profiling its users, monitoring them actively through artificial intelligence, ranking them, restricting them and also making them ‘disappear’ at times.
On July 26, 2018, US President Donald Trump declared war on Twitter from his Twitter account.
He accused Twitter of shadow banning prominent Republican handles and threatened to launch an investigation. Here is his angry tweet below.
Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2018
Twitter had already responded by then. Their co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted and clarified that shadow banning is a myth and it doesn’t happen in their company.
A short thread addressing some issues folks are encountering as a result of our conversational health work, specifically the perception of “shadowbanning” based on content or ideology. It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work. https://t.co/MN97l7w7RF
— jack (@jack) July 25, 2018
His PR department was activated, he and his hand-picked team went on a press merry-go-round, trying to explain the situation. His senior employees wrote blogs and gave interviews, trying to prove their own country’s President wrong.
Unfortunately, in the process, they revealed more than what they could conceal.
They not only exposed a faulty methodology, very soon, everybody’s worst fears took shape.
Twitter admitted that it has been profiling its users, monitoring them actively through artificial intelligence, ranking them, restricting them and also making them ‘disappear’ at times. The way and the logic behind the profiling was never revealed.
We will come back to all that later, but first, let’s address the immediate question in your mind.
“Come on, that’s the US. How do you know it’s happening in India?”
The fact is that like any US-based MNC, the chunk of the company’s policies are decided at their headquarters. So, most of the policies that were formulated in the US headquarters were applied all over the world including India.
I am prepared to take a bet with you.
Let’s bet a hundred rupees with each of you. I know that tens of thousands read my pieces, so its not a mean sum that I am willing to pay.
I am so confident of the odds because I know in my heart that it is true that Twitter handles belonging to the right wing political ideology are treated no better than the Republicans in the US.
Many prominent Twitter handles belonging to the right wing feel that many of their followers (the figure might be in lakhs for each one of them) don’t get to see their tweets in their timeline. The complaint is the same and many among them have tweeted about it too.
Time and again, you will see some prominent right wingers in India wonder why their tweets are not visible to their followers or the followers wonder why they don’t see some prominent right wing tweets on their timelines, even though they are tweeting regularly. They have to go to their profiles to see their tweets.
This is not the only question that has baffled Twitter users. There are others too. Here are some other sample questions from right wingers and their supporters. Maybe you might identify with some of them.
1) Why does Twitter immediately lock down some people as ‘punishment’ — and why does it allow some people to post freely, even if they are using the same kind of language and content? 2) Why some prominent users never get too many retweets or impressions or why are these (interactions on tweets) decreasing over a period of time?