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Twitter Censorship & Shadowbanning w/ Project Veritas
Recorded: June 19, 2023 Duration: 2:22:52Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights concerns about Twitter's shadow banning practices, technical challenges in content moderation, and the impact of these issues on user engagement and platform revenue. There is a focus on the need for transparency and technical improvements to address these challenges, alongside speculation about the future of NFTs and advertising strategies.
Full Transcription
All right. I'm just checking out a bunch of stuff here. Hold on. Perfect. So, Amma, how are you guys doing?
All good. How are you, Doc's Danish?
Hey, man. Sam, we've known each other for too long. You can't call me Danish anymore.
Doc. No, I can't call you Doc. That would relate too close to somebody else.
No, no. Don't call me Doc either. Is Donish, man. All right. Uh,
Sorry, man.
By the way, I'm...
You know, it's very late for me.
I've just woke up from a siesta.
I'm just trying to...
Just trying to wake up a little bit.
I'm really excited about this tweet.
I'm going to do to troll Mario.
It just went out.
Yeah, by the way, everybody,
we're just waiting for a few more people to show up
and then we're going to get started.
All right.
There we are.
People are going up.
My only worry about today's space
is that once we get started...
We're all very likely to get shadow banned.
Just letting people know anybody that comes up.
There is a world in which we might get shadow banned.
I think Salaman's already shadow band.
We used our powers.
I will prove by the end of the show today that Soleiman deserves to be shadow banned.
I can prove it in about 30 seconds.
But yeah, I hope everybody's really excited about having their tweets not reach anybody.
and about losing all control of their account.
It's just, it's going to be great.
That's right.
Bree, don't cry.
It's okay.
It's okay.
I've seen your trolling tweet down the show like it.
Thank you.
It's great.
That's probably going to get your shadow band.
These guys are connected, you know, especially Simon.
Oh my God.
Salaman knows everybody.
But, you know, Salaman so connected that he got shadow banned.
By the way, can everybody send Mario some love for finally getting rid of the Cryptopunk
and calling it quits with all NFTs?
In my opinion, that finally puts the final nail in the coffin of NFTs.
Oh, thank God, it's over.
Can we just kind of get excited about the fact that energy is finally?
Are you sure he didn't call the bottom and now NFTs are going to fly because, you know, they've detached from that.
That link from our spaces.
Sam.
Well, the controversy we cause every day.
Let's not try to make NFTs happen when everybody.
You don't want to make NFTs great again?
No, I don't want to make NFTs great again.
Never again.
I remember when random people who've never done anything in tech were saying,
look, you could take this and it's ownership.
It's like actual ownership of a JPEG.
And I was like, okay, that sounds great, man.
That sounds great.
You don't need utility.
You just need community.
Okay, that sounds great.
That sounds like a good idea.
But yeah.
Well, you know, finally dead.
Where are our hostesses from the most tests?
Where are Mario and Salaman?
Are they having a little cuddl before we go light?
Do they not realize we're already live?
Oh no, they know.
I'm just using this opportunity to completely shit on both of them.
And I'm really excited about the fact that I'm getting to do this.
But it's going to be great.
So I'm on should be joining us any moment now.
And we're going to get started.
Thank everybody for waiting for a few seconds here.
But yeah.
So for everybody that's listening, I do want to encourage you to go to the bottom right.
You can go into the comments.
Today we're going to be talking a lot about what Project Veritas released, talking about shadow banning, and they have some exclusive footage.
regarding that we're going to go pretty deep on that beyond that we do want to talk about
everything twitter censorship and you know i i do want to highlight that twitter
And I will start with my own, my own bias.
I thought I knew this moment would come.
I will force Silemon to admit that I called this like months ago.
But, you know, we knew that this could happen.
And censorship on Twitter has taken a very different approach.
You have these different approaches towards soft censorship.
And I think it's worse than it has ever been.
And so I will make that case today that this is worse than what it used to be.
And that will be where I will begin.
But give us a few more minutes.
If you agree with me, please do go to the bottom right, the comments and let me know.
If you disagree with me, then shut the hell up.
Just kidding.
You can go into comments.
You know, there's an irony that back in the old days, there was a little gang of, of
of you know hardcore Tesla investors and I was I was a member of that little gang
and we along with with Elon would obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter and I'm telling you
that was where shallow bands were really prolific throughout that community because you know
Tesla was with this renegade at the time fighting big oil and all of this and the number of
legitimate accounts just posting good information that
that you know we're getting shadow band it was happening every single day in that little world
um so i suspect that's hopefully that doesn't happen anymore but i think a lot of this
now that it's happening is from legacy code, is that right?
So we're actually not sure.
So this is part of what Project Veritas was looking at,
but also what we've been trying to figure out
is how much of this is legacy code,
which is what has been said,
and how much of this is continued actions.
And there are people that have provided additional information
that we will discuss today
about the new people that actually have joined
Twitter and what they
you know what they have been doing
behind the scenes so I'm gonna see if
Suleiman perfect Salaamon
go ahead take it over yeah first of all
guys thank you very much for joining us this is going to be an
important space it's about Twitter censorship and shadow ban and
that's
Isn't that amazing that we're on Twitter and we've got this platform and at the same time when there are issues with this platform such as shadow banning, such as censorship, we're able to do a space on this platform and talk about the issues pertaining to it.
So that is brilliant.
The second point is Mario's had an upgrade.
He's now got a new profile picture.
He's becoming a big boy now.
And...
unfortunately he won't be joining us because he's actually on a flight so he's there but he's not
really there so i thought i'd let you guys know but or any guests because i'm seeing a number of people
requesting um
who have been invited,
check your DMs
because you will have got an invite there.
And also, I just want to thank Project Veritas
for joining us.
So yeah, thanks for joining us, Project Veritas.
And I'm also bringing up Chris Harstock,
who is the chief investigator at Project Veritas as well.
I'll pin their tweet as well on the...
on the nest so you can check out
because they were looking into Shadow Banning.
They posted it about a week ago
in terms of Twitter chat Shadow Banning.
So it's going to be brilliant to get into that.
But yeah, guys, I am actually Shadow Band as well.
So Twitter has gone after the man of the people.
So we need to talk about this now.
Why are the people being attacked?
But Danish...
If you can give people some context on when you got shadow banned,
what was the underlying situation with that?
I think people want to know why they would shadow ban a man of the time.
I mean, I don't want to make it too much about me,
but the people know what it's really about.
But Danish, before that, I heard you say that you were right and I was wrong.
So what is it you think you were right on?
I was right that Elon was talking a lot of trash when he joined and with everything that he did with the Twitter files and everything that he said that he was going to fix everything and everything around being a free speech absolutist or whatever absolutist.
I think it was a lot of bark and very little bite.
And I will prove that over and over again tonight.
I hope everybody here who has been defending Elon
over and over and over again finally agrees
that it was all good messaging, good marketing,
and in the end he failed at the main task he promised he would actually deliver on.
So let me bring in Project Veritas immediately.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much for having us. We're happy to be here.
Obviously, this is a pretty important time in the modern media landscape.
You know, sometimes it takes five plus years and a $44 billion purchase of a public company
to corroborate a story that's of great public importance.
And we're happy to see, I mean, obviously, you know, a lot of us, like you say yourself,
your shadow band, you can feel this on the user end.
And it's one thing to have staff from Twitter sort of
you know, uncomfortably admit that these things are going on, but then some five and a half years later,
we have official confirmation from inside Twitter staff that it is hidden, buried in the code.
And this is just quite frankly disturbing.
And I'm sure you're all familiar with the Twitter files, you know, quite frankly, that's maybe the most shocking part of this was that it was truly ramped up.
leading up to the 2020 presidential election in this country.
I mean, you have ASAC Chan from San Francisco FBI HQ.
That's a special agent in charge, Elvis Chan.
This gentleman was passing down compiled lists, which were put together from the FBI's
National Election Command Post of accounts that, quote, may warrant additional action.
So that's troubling inherently.
So again, we're just happy to be here in the public space with you all and have an important conversation about what that means today for journalism in America and, of course, internationally.
So, I mean, what can I call you?
Who is actually representing Project Veritas through the project Lerg?
Forgive me.
My name is Jonathan.
I'm on the communications team here.
And, of course, we have Christian Hartsock, who's one of our chief investigative journalists,
who is happy to speak with us tonight as well.
Christian has been involved in some of the most incredible, important investigative discoveries
of my lifetime, I'll say personally.
And certainly, of course, on behalf of PV as an organization.
Okay.
I see Christian is in and it looks like we just need to, he is a speaker, excellent.
So, thank you all.
So Christian, I'll go to you.
Hey, Christian.
Thank you for joining us.
I want for the people that have not watched the video, can you summarize the key findings from the video for our audience?
Christian, your audio is coming in and out.
Can you guys hear me?
It's okay.
Maybe I'm being shocked at.
Yeah, I can hear you now.
Perfect.
Okay.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
So this was, you know, it,
It's worth noting that, so this was five years ago, and prior to our doing this story, the world did not, the world outside of Twitter did not know the word shadow banning.
Shadow banning entered the American lexicon by way of these video, these undercover videotapes that are, that are undercover journalists got.
It was actually a term of art used inside of the, internally at Twitter.
So, you know, we had undercover journalists up in San Francisco talking with Stephen Pierre, who was a Twitter engineer.
He explained shadow banning.
He said it's going to ban a way of talking.
We had former Twitter software engineer, a PNF Vedrievo.
It's taken me five years to master how to pronounce his name, but he said that he explained it.
They're going to think that no quote, they're going to think that no one is engaging with their content when in reality no one is seeing it.
We had former Twitter content review agent Mo Neri, one of the people I interfaced with.
He said, if it was a pro-Trump thing and I'm anti-Trump, I can ban his whole account.
It's at your discretion.
Okay.
We had a Linda Hassan, who was the policy manager for Twitter trust and safety, and she said, we're trying to downrank shitty people not to show up. And that's what they were working on at the time. That was the β this was January 2018. And then we had Parney β
Singh, who is the Twitter direct messaging engineer,
and he said you have about 5,000 keywords to describe a redneck.
The majority of it are for Republicans.
So they had a whole vocabulary of keywords
that were recognized by the machine learning
to downrank into shadow ban, you know,
essentially thought criminals.
We had a former Twitter engineer, Conrado Miranda,
And he confirmed in 2017 with us that the tools were already in place to censor pro-Trump or conservative content on the platform.
And when one of our undercover journalists went to confirm that these capabilities existed, he said, yes, quote, that is a thing.
Right.
And you had the software engineer at Twitter.
The way he explained it is he said, quote, 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 think that no one is engaging with their content when in reality no one is seeing.
It's a very cowardly...
way of, you know, the fact that that Twitter at the time did not want to just own the fact
that they must not have had the, the, the, the full approval of their own conscience.
They, you know, which is one of the most Freudian components of this.
The fact that they did not want, they didn't want you to know that you were being
shadow ban. It was a very cowardly, uh, uh,
M.O. that they had in place. Well, Christian, I will, I will say one thing, which is, isn't that
the exact same thing that's going on right now? We're acting like this was only in the old
regime. Aren't we still shadow? I mean, people don't know that they are shadow banned. Correct?
Right. Yeah. Exactly. So nothing's really changed even in the new regime, correct?
In the new Twitter? Yes, and Twitter 2.0, as people like to say. Yeah, with Elon Musk.
Well, I can't editorialize on that.
I can only speak to the investigations that we have released, you know, or that are, and I can't comment on investigations that are ongoing.
So, but I know, what do you think?
Do you, I mean, do you see much change between?
I mean, it's clear.
I mean, so I'm on.
Soleiman himself has been shadow banned.
A lot of people that are listening to us and people that are commenting are telling us that they're being shadow banned.
You can look up online and there are many sources that you can use to see whether you're shadow banned.
And even after all of this, Elon has come out and said, oh, yeah, yeah, no, we still have that.
And he said, I mean, the tweet at the top from Brie posted it up there saying, oh, yeah, true, so many skeletons in the closet.
No one at the company knew this code existed.
So I wanted to go to that.
So is this an algorithm that's doing it without any human intervention?
According to the reporting from Project Veritas, that is correct.
Allow me to correct that one point.
I may be mistaken on this, but I believe it is both.
So we do know for a fact, especially with the Twitter files
and Michael Schellenberger's discovery of emails between ASAC Chan from FBIHQ and San Francisco
and Yoel Roth, then head of Twitter...
safety, content moderation, something like that.
We do know that they were manually banning accounts or rather reviewing them and then, you know,
or just taking the order perhaps from from on high.
But we do also know from what the engineers told us that there was an aspect of automating this.
And it's important to note there are several layers or tiers, if you will, of being shadow banned.
Of course, you can have a search suggestion ban or a search ban, a ghost ban.
Then there's, of course, just reply deboasting.
And again, one of the gentlemen from Twitter that Christian Hartsock interfaced with did confirm to us that, you know, on the user end, it appears as though you're having impressions and interactions, but it's bogus data.
And they literally, I believe you referred to it as trash.
It's, they throw it out.
Let me ask you a question on that, because this is the issue.
Like, I understand we want to trash the previous Twitter.
and I agree with it
I agree with everything's here
but as soon as we talk about the current Twitter
which isn't
we're now 9, 10 months in
and these things are still happening
we did like
and this is for anybody
please like push back on me
what I'm saying on this
like I'm Shadow Band
I don't know who to go to
I don't know how to report it.
I don't know why I'm shadow band.
I wasn't even told our shadow band.
How I found out was one of my followers tagged me and said,
I'm trying to put your name in the search handle.
And that's how I find out.
And so then I checked and found out.
So we've got all of these things which are happening.
People are getting shadow band and...
It does feel like there is some kind of specific types of people who are also getting shadow banned.
You know, if you speak about a specific topic.
And so again, there's other topics that seem like what Elon doesn't have an issue with,
that those people are not being shadow banned.
So those people he engages with, which may be vocally talking to LGBTQ or vocally talk about race issues in the United States.
Right.
Do not get shadow band.
So my question to people is, like, I'll please push back on me.
Like, what, like, is this the case or is there something else to it?
Let me go to brief her because I think she's going to may disagree.
And then I'll even project Veritas if you want to reply.
And then I want to go to James because it seems that James agrees with me.
Hey, good morning from Rome, guys. I actually, I have two questions, really, because my account
has seen a significant drop. I would say in the last four to five months, a significant drop.
And I'm not using such terms. I might be reporting on certain news of the day that might
involve some of those key terms. But I'm pretty careful when it comes to really using key terms that could
shadow banning because we know that there's old code in this.
What I'm really interested in is number one, who is the new head of trust and safety?
No one knows their name from what I understand.
So if there's anybody out there, including Project Fairtas, who's found that out, that would
be great to know because we need to start tagging those individuals.
And then secondly, because I'm not an engineer, I don't quite understand how, um,
how Elon is addressing malicious code.
Are they rewriting new code while they're smoke testing,
you know, while we're still in operation,
you know, Twitter's updating all the time.
So are they rewriting new code?
Are they finding dependencies on old code?
Like how is it that, you know,
some of these shadow bands that may have been, you know,
overwritten are coming into play again?
Because it does seem like what Elon is saying,
like he didn't even know that,
this exists. Well, I think he's saying that. So one thing, I'm sorry, Project Veritas,
did you have a response to that question? Yes. Just upon cursory research, it appears some
outlets such as Fortune magazine reported on the first of June of this year that someone named
Ella Irwin had resigned from a recent appointment of Twitter's head of trust and safety. So as far as we know,
that
position may not have been replaced, but just food for thought, I did want to add that the fact,
we understand obviously this is still ongoing. And the Twitter, you know, the Twitter engineers
have just pointed out that they've discovered the code that was buried deep. But it is a good sign,
I think, personally, that we are having this conversation in a public space on Twitter. And just
the nature of that is kind of cathartic, given the state of affairs back in 2017, 2018.
Yeah.
Yes, but again, and I've found this.
So first of all, you guys have had this reporting for some time, right?
And many people have mentioned that it has been programmatically embedded in the code.
Right? We've known this to be true.
So for Elon to come out and say, oh, no one in the entire company knew that this code existed, in my opinion, is completely BS.
And I'm going to continue to call out that that's the case.
I think this is absolute BS.
There's no way that they didn't know that this was the case.
Travis?
Well, I'm going to point out he likely fired people on the trust and safety team.
They're responsible for this.
So you all know, Twitter is very...
The app looks simple when you're looking at it when you're scrolling through the feed.
But these recommendation algorithms can be quite complicated.
So in particular, when it comes to trust and safety, there are tons of programs that are ranking things, that are deb boosting things, whatever you want to call it.
And when you lay off a large percentage of the trust and safety team, there could be one or two people on these companies who know about these systems and how they work.
So I think in this case, it's not likely that it was buried deep or hidden.
He probably just laid the person off who was responsible for it.
I mean, again, you know, when you take over a CEO of a company and the first action that you have is to release Twitter files, by the way, Bree, I checked you're not shadow bands.
According to the websites, I sent that to you.
Those websites are really outdated.
Like, you have to understand this is old code.
And so that's one of the things you're pointing out that, you know,
Elon is saying that he didn't know
or they didn't know about this particular line of coding.
What seems to be the case is because he knew
that things were going on with the shadow banning
when he took over. What seems to be the case,
what he seems to be indicating is that
as they're removing code,
dependencies are activated.
I think this is, again, I'm not...
But I agree. I will push back
at what the solution he's proposing is
to one of the Krasenstein brothers
and...
And his response to the tweet was,
it's not that they're gonna stop shadow banning people.
I thought this was a freedom of speech tool.
He said that what they're going to do
is tell you that you're a shadow banned.
By the way, you know who else does that?
Does anybody know?
Can anybody name which platform does that?
Facebook.
Facebook does that.
So what's the difference now?
What is the whole point about being a free speech platform?
Sarah?
Well, can I say that they're going to tell you, but they are not telling people?
And that's an important distinction to make, that people are not notified when they're shadowbanded.
You get notified if you have a suspension.
You get notified if you've been reported for certain tweets, but there is nothing to tell a person other than what appears to be outdated websites.
Right.
And Salaman is right.
There appears to be certain topics that equal a shadow ban.
He said, he mentioned LGBTQ.
And I know that he's mentioned, you know, in the past, certain religious topics that can't be discussed without getting a shadow band.
And you talked about, somebody talked about old code.
And Elon mentioned it in a tweet.
If there's old code, it's been long enough.
for Twitter to put something in place to fix this.
And I think it would be a great idea just to finish out
if our listening audience would check on one of the shadow band websites
and just post if they are shadow banned.
It doesn't hurt to check.
periodically because it does affect your reach and engagement. Thanks, Dr. Donish.
Let me go to James. James, I mean, are we over exaggerating? Do we need to give Musk a bit more time?
It's all code. It's hard to sort out. What do you think, James?
James.
No, we don't. I'm a great believer not really following the science, but following the data.
So I've been following this story with interest for a number of months because it applies to me.
And I don't want to say it's kind of kind of poor me without looking at the bigger picture.
So I've gathered together a number of people who are influencers, who were legacy blue ticks,
and either the decision to go for Twitter Blue or not in my case, because...
I tested Twitter Blue out because I like the aspect of longer tweets and videos and so on.
But to Cambridge, when Musk said that there'll be amplification through Twitter Blue.
That to me is a diametric opposite of true freedom of speech.
It should be a level playing field.
I have no problem with Twitter Blue offering other services of content.
But amplification was a bit of a red line for me.
So I came off Twitter Blue after losing legacy.
And actually, this is where the data comes in.
And other people have shared this, whether on Twitter Blue or not.
Just on the research I've got on my own analytics, I was largely averaging about 120 million impressions a month.
That is now down since March.
That's now gone down to 25 million.
I'm seeing retweets on my feed,
rocket to about 100 in a matter of minutes,
and then come down in number.
And I've been on the same follower number now for three months.
And my average growth of followers till March was about 15,000 per month,
organically grown, just based on my own content.
And so in my own experience and the other people that have been speaking to, something has happened on many feeds, many accounts, since about March this year.
That's under Musk's watch.
So yes, there was problems with old Twitter, de-platforming, especially people are talking about vaccines and lockdowns and so on.
That was a massive problem.
But I don't entirely buy what Musk has put in the last couple of days.
Because for a lot of people, the major de-platforming might have disappeared, but the suppression has increased since the spring of this year.
We've been following this.
There's about 20 or 30 people,
major influences that I've got in a particular WhatsApp group,
and we're looking at this and sharing stories.
And we've all got the same patterns.
And it's all happened since March.
On different auspices, for instance,
not being able to grow followers,
not being able to have the same numbers of retweets,
and a massive decline on impressions.
So something has happened with the algorithms
in the last three or four months.
So I don't entirely buy that this is a legacy problem of Twitter.
I'll open this up to everyone else
and about their own experience and so on,
but that's my own experience and also many others.
Let me go to Darth.
Darth, I know you want to push back a bit, and we do want it a bit of pushback.
So look, when it comes to Elon, you have got a scenario where you've got this complex code.
It's hard to get into it and basically sort out the issues that you have with the code.
And so all of these things are happening automatically.
That's the other argument.
But if you want to add to it, please let me know.
Go ahead, Darth.
So I came in, I came in kind of late, but there were a few things I wanted to add some context to, because you guys were discussing a few items with which I have plenty of experience.
I'm a pretty...
heavy Twitter users. So I got really, really good at understanding their terms of service.
I've helped dozens of people win appeals. I'm really good in getting people their accounts back.
So I'm really familiar with how things work. Part of the issue you guys are talking about comes down to
a semantics problem. So there's a tweet. I can drop it up top and show you from...
This was from Twitter at one point.
Twitter safety, I think, put this one out.
And it said at the top, I had a few emojis.
And it said, no censorship, no shadow banning.
And then a checkmark.
Freedom of speech, not reach.
When they say no shadow banning,
when you guys are looking up on the shadow banning tool on that website,
All that's doing, that's a completely, it's a semantic argument.
So that shadow banning refers to whether or not your account is hidden.
You don't appear in searches.
And if your replies appear under the potentially damaging or harmful information on the bottom, right?
Where you have to click more replies.
That's all that test shows you.
Beyond that, what we're referring to is shadow banning.
What a lot of you guys are referring to is shadow banning.
is simply your content not having to reach you normally would,
not gaining as many followers, not having as many impressions,
seeing a big drop in engagement.
That sounds about right, right?
That seems like that's the semantic disparity
between those two terms.
So there's a couple issues there.
One, there's a very easy solution to all of this, and I wrote a whole thread.
I don't know why nobody ever helped me promote this.
But there's certain things I'll talk about where I don't get any engagement.
Sometimes my threads go insanely viral.
Sometimes I get no engagement.
I put up a list, essentially, advice to Elon.
All you have to do, this is a simple solution.
If you pay for Twitter blue and you get shadow ban or you're suspended,
you instantly get access to a person who will help you work through it and you can appeal with a human.
Because right now, if you got suspended for any reason,
the second you appeal, you're automatically rejected 90% of the time by a bot.
Right.
Most people then delete the tweet, accept the seven-day ban and come back.
All you have to do is appeal two or three more times and you'll get a person,
and then they'll overturn the appeal when it's genuinely BS and it's not a fair suspension.
So things like that.
So he can easily incorporate that into Twitter blue.
When you're paying for a service and then you're seeing a drop in engagement
because of something you said that was some milk toast comment that shouldn't really be a big deal,
but it might offend some super protected minority group.
That's just ridiculous.
So a lot of it comes down to what people think is shadow banning.
That's a big problem.
The other thing is it's not necessarily malicious.
Like this code was just, there are a lot of these things that are embedded,
but like somebody was just saying a second ago, this is more new.
This isn't necessarily legacy code because a lot of this happened after he changed and engaged and initiated the new freedom of speech, not reach.
And that's fine. He had also said publicly, if you are shadow band, we'll tell you why and how long your shadow band for.
So I have a whole bunch of tweets when I advise people on how to beat suspensions.
I give them Elon or Ella Irwin tweets or Twitter safety tweets to put in their appeal that specifically explains how what they did allegedly wasn't a violation.
And they always get it overturned. I've gotten good by just referring to those as resources.
There were several comments where Elon specifically said,
we will let you know if your shadow banned and why.
And he's relying on that semantic disparity where he's saying,
if you fail the shadow banning.com test will tell you if your shadow ban,
which they still don't do, but that's besides the point.
They don't tell you why your engagement is going down
or why you're not getting as many followers as you normally would.
That's the part where they're not being transparent.
That is the worst part.
That is the sneakiest part of it all, which is that they don't tell you
So do you know, you know, I'm going to use Salaiman as an example.
Suleiman, and he mentioned this earlier, but we have, you know, a few thousand more people here.
You know, Suleiman, when he was tweeting about very specific topics that shall not be mentioned because I don't want to get Shadow Banned.
And he tweeted about it.
I would say within hours, and I will even give you some examples here,
and again, it's okay because I'm talking about him.
But I was going to say that, you know,
he literally went from his engagement being three or four times higher,
on on on tweets to way way lower and by the way when not solemann but another speaker that he often speak uh you know does other you know side shows with uh where he just comes on a speaker but they host i can't even see when they start a space
Like I literally cannot see when the space is being started and I follow that person directly.
I can't search for them in the search bar.
And so this is, what is the point?
This whole freedom of speech versus freedom of reach argument, I have to say has to be
the dumbest thing.
It's a great slogan.
It makes absolutely no sense.
You know what the funny part about all this is?
If I wanted to have just freedom of speech and have nobody see my tweets, I would go into my notes and my
on my on my iPhone and just write a note to myself i don't need that i'm here because i'm trying
to engage with others and have a conversation that's why we're here sam the
The issue with the algorithm questions are, so let's say Salaman puts out a tweet that is against the particular movement with certain keywords from that movement, surely somebody has to analyze that tweet to know whether it's pro or against if the algorithm is just picking up the keywords rather than the tone or the inclination of the person writing.
So that's why everyone's saying that they saw this.
I've read a few articles as well that have supported this.
On actually, I'm not going to personalise anything for Slaman here, but obviously I'm aware of the tweets he's put out that may have led to this, but there are also people on the other side of that debate saying that they're experiencing shadow bands as well.
So this feels like potentially it is something new and the algorithm. It's also a very hot topic, so it would be strange if this was ancient code from five or six years ago when nobody was talking about this.
Well, just to comment on that, just so you know, almost all of this, like almost 100% of this, because they have a skeleton crew there, Elon dropped down. I mean, they only make so much revenue. So he just, he cut their expenses by an insane amount. They don't have personnel. Almost every single thing that we've been talking about is 100% automated. You can go and tweet on.
Oh man, I've had a rough day.
I hope a meteor will just come down on my house right now.
And if two or three people report that, you'll get suspended for encouraging self-harm or for talking about self-harm.
If you appeal it and you get past the initial automated rejection and appeal a second time to get to a person,
they'll say, obviously, you weren't talking about hurting yourself.
That's absurd.
You were being sarcastic or hyperbolic or whatever.
But none of that context is in any way relevant because it's almost entirely bot-driven.
And even the initial appeals, not in every case.
Sometimes you get a human.
Almost every appeal is auto-rejected at first because it's done by a bot.
And if the bot says it's a suspension, they just reject the appeal.
And you have to keep appealing.
This has happened with me, like Malcolm Flex.
It happened with Doc and helping with a whole bunch of people who have helped get there and comes back here.
But the issue is, if we're talking about shadow bands, something they're claiming doesn't exist,
it's very hard to get customer support on.
Obviously, Elon's now acknowledged it.
But also, shadow bands, the algorithm used to target people who had had tweets reported, who had been blocked, things like that.
So it's quite complex.
But this does feel like new code if it's potentially targeting hot topics.
Yeah, this is what I said to Calisi, just so you guys know.
I've had a couple people who are Shadow Band.
Most people, the only response they get is you posted something that was marked unsafe or potentially adult or potentially violent.
So your account is short-term shadow band.
It'll be restored as long as you don't post anything else.
That's usually what you get back.
Yeah.
I told Calisi, the one way around it, if you wanted to try to appeal to support,
you can't go and appeal a locked or suspended account unless your account's locked or suspended.
You can't get to that contact form.
You can't do the Twitter blue features.
The only thing you can do is general account access support.
And they don't respond to that as quickly as they normally do.
So as long as you don't post anything else to continue the shadow ban,
if it goes off in a week or so, I don't think I know of shadow bans that unless you continue posting content that offends their, you know,
Delegate sensibilities, I don't think it continues beyond like a couple weeks.
So as long as, yeah, if they respond quickly, great.
But unless they were to respond within the first week or two, you wouldn't be able to get any support.
That is the one workaround, though, is to go general account access questions.
That's the one, the one contact form you can use on the Twitter contact page that can actually get to somebody about that topic.
I mean, that someone here defend.
Sorry, I want to get, there's a bunch of hands up.
I'm sorry.
I know, unless you feel comfortable defending this whole approach that's being taken by Elon, not that it's just some embedded code, not that it's something.
Don't make excuses because excuses are stupid.
I don't need that.
I want someone to actually defend the approach here.
Who is willing to defend the approach?
Travis, are you willing?
I see you keep raising your hands.
Are you willing to defend the approach that they're taking?
I'm not going to defend what Elon's doing, if that's what you're asking me to.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'll comment.
Yeah, but the reason.
That's willing to actually defend the approach that Elon is taken.
Yeah.
Is the belief here that Elon is doing this himself intentionally in lying about, or is that the belief?
I mean, they've made the decision that when you do get quote unquote shadow banned, you will find out.
I hope what he means by that is that when they reduce your search capabilities, like people can search you or not.
If people can't search you or if they say you have sensitive content, you will find out for once.
And that will be the approach.
Does somebody believe that that is the right of them?
Okay, I'll tell you what they're doing.
This is this one out if you would like.
Really quick. Let me give you one example.
Let me give you one quick example because I'm driving.
It's going to be loud.
So I'm going to disconnect my mic in a second.
But the one thing that he can actually say, and this is something that could be shady on his part, he has one out.
There's one thing that they actually do when they're reducing your reach.
The one example I can think of.
I made a joke.
I made a sarcastic joke.
that included the word tranny in it, right?
But I use that term all the time.
I never get shadow ban.
I never have any issue.
When I made this one joke just a few days ago,
I got the same thing on the bottom that Daily Wire got
when they posted what is a woman.
You couldn't share it.
And that's the one thing that I've seen that actually is transparent
where it's saying the reach of this content is diminished
so only your followers can see it.
It cannot be shared.
So that's the only thing that I'm aware of that in any way notifies you
that you've seen a reduction in the ability of anything you post to be, to be shared.
Yes, and that's because transphobia is still against the Twitter rules.
I just checked. I'm still on there.
So, listen, you all want to talk about what he wants to do.
The reason Twitter and social media companies do content moderation is because they have to make money.
Nobody wants to advertise on a site that's full of...
harmful divisive, harassment content, platform manipulation, all sorts of bad content.
So Twitter is not doing great right now.
Their revenue is down 60% and the platform's not growing.
I think part of what you all are seeing is that people aren't using Twitter as much.
So I'm a bit confused because I don't think I'm in the same political persuasion as the rest of you all.
What do you all want?
Because you have Elon in control acting as essentially a right-wing activist at this point.
What do you all want him to do?
You want him to continue to allow you all to spread harmful content and hurt his revenue?
And then the Twitter and the platform will just die slowly.
I just don't understand.
I think you all need to ask yourself that.
There's an irony.
You want a solution to that?
Shocking content.
The solution is there.
Elon says if your content is labeled offensive or whatever, no advertising will be associated with it.
End of discussion.
The shocking content is the most popular content on Twitter right now.
The most...
Okay, so any content that advertisers don't want, doesn't get advertisers.
The device of content triggers something in our brain, and it keeps you on the platform longer,
but people don't want to spend money.
Marketers don't want to spend money, and that's why they're withdrawing their funding from the platform.
So in terms of keeping a social media company running and letting people...
post harmful content. It hurts the revenue. It hurts the environment for investment for marketers.
Yeah, but I think they're actually withdrawing their money because of the espousals of the owner, the manager,
the person that raised all the money to buy the platform, less about the content.
I mean, he's the same, he's doing the same type of content.
You had ISIS recruiting on Twitter at large scale.
Yeah, you have tons of sexual content and child pornography on Instagram,
which even Lex Friedman didn't ask Mark Zuckerberg about that last week.
For some reason, nobody asked Mark Zuckerberg why there's so much child pornography on his platforms.
Anyways, I think that the reason that the revenue is declining is the management style and the
and the way that Elon Musk communicates to the public and the way that he acts on the platform,
it's not the people that are posting content on the platform.
And then I think somebody brought this up just a second ago, but like,
There must be like a mass exodus off of this platform.
I bet you the monthly active users are half of what they were 12 months ago.
And again, the person that runs the...
I've seen this first-hand...
Let me tell you, a first-handed...
The platform is notorious for running companies that lose money,
that push the boundaries of what investors are willing to deal with.
It's something...
Elon Musk. So this is just like the latest iteration of it. It's just a social media platform now.
I'm going to give you a sort of personal story of why I think that's right what you just said.
Like I said, look, when I said at the beginning, a lot of people may have missed it. Back in the day,
there was a little hardcore family of Tesla investors fighting the fud, you know, who believed in Tesla long before anybody else did.
And they were incredibly supportive of Elon, everything he did, you know.
Yeah.
fanboys,
whatever you want to
call them
at the
at the time. I have seen a distinct shift in those very people.
These are people with profiles of hundreds of thousands of followers
who built up their followership by being, you know, all about SpaceX,
all about Tesla, all about Elon.
I'm seeing a significant number of those either leaving Twitter or, you know,
we have private chat groups that are full of like these high profile sort of
old school Twitter influences, for example.
And they will say in those chat groups,
you know, I can't publicly support Elon anymore.
I don't feel comfortable on Twitter anymore because, you know,
Tesla was built by liberals, you know, people who wanted to care about the environment.
They were buying mod-l-lesses before anybody else believed in the brand.
So I'm telling you from a personal point of view that I've seen this directly,
I know that people leave Twitter.
I have a mixed kind of feeling about Elon.
Question on that.
Isn't that then, and you guys know up to now, I've just been on your side about this whole shadow-badding thing,
maybe because it's affected.
me but I was talking about it before it even affected me.
But in terms of that,
that's just a political attack,
isn't it,
to, like,
pressure and bully him?
Because a report just came out recently about Instagram and the level of child...
No, no,
I'm referring this directly to advertisers,
not to personal stuff.
I believe if an entire hardcore...
No, but I...
Simon, if an entire hardcore community people who backed and believed in Elon for years on end,
basically devoted their lives to Elon and Tesla,
if that entire, or if a large proportion of that community feel uncomfortable, let's say,
they're not going to necessarily openly turn on Elon,
but they feel uncomfortable about some of the things he does.
And I do too.
I still have huge respect and admiration for Elon,
but I do feel uncomfortable to see him every day interacting with anti-LGBQ content.
like clockwork, I believe that advertisers feel that same level of discomfort.
So, you know, that may be the issue that that is costing Twitter money.
Elon did not invest in Twitter as a charity.
You know, one thing I noticed about this whole transparency thing,
When the Twitter files leaks came out, I thought, great, this is going to be a dissemination to the public.
We're all going to get to study these files, you know, potentially with stuff redacted,
but we're going to get to study this huge release of information, and we're all going to get to form our own opinions.
That wasn't what happened.
It was a cherry-picked group of people with their own biases, some of them deliberately chosen because they would confirm the biases of Elon.
and we saw that and we pushed back on it on these very spaces
and I think one of them actually Elon ended up removing them
possibly because we made it so apparent
that they couldn't have chosen somebody more biased
to leak a particular Twitter file.
So I think we need to see a bit more evidence
of this Twitter 2.0 being really about transparency
before we can believe it
because I think there is a lot of evidence that says
it's not quite as focused on transparency
as we were originally led to believe.
The problem with what you're saying is
this is i mean if i was to boil down your argument what you're saying is liberals helped support him
in tesla and so now that he's given conservatives a voice they've basically abandoned him and therefore
again that's just bullying him pressuring him that's really not what i said to laman i don't
think anyone in this room thinks that's what i mean why you're saying the liberals don't like what he's
doing and what is the
I'm saying that some people who supported Elon for a long time feel uncomfortable.
And I'm saying if that's possible, then we should consider the fact that advertisers feel uncomfortable.
Are the liberals?
I would say not necessarily.
A lot of them are very wealthy capitalists.
I mean, you mentioned before they were liberal, that's why.
But, you know, I said they would have had liberal leanings in some degree.
I said it.
A lot of the early.
So my point is this, what you're saying is these liberals who supported him during Tesla,
you even said they were liberals, they were for the environment and so on and so forth.
And that's why they supported him.
And now they no longer support him.
And what's the reason for that?
Because he's given conservative.
No, they don't support him because he lied.
No, no, no.
Donish.
That's why they don't support.
And to be honest, Salaman,
he claims that he could not live up to.
Yeah, this really isn't what I said.
And Slaman can twist it.
Well, that's fine.
That's his prerogative.
You did say that liberals don't support him.
You said that.
Yeah, no, no, Sarah, I didn't say that. I said that his hardcore support was originally very liberal. It really was. Trust me. And I'm saying that as, and I'm saying that I've seen a lot of people personally who are in that hardcore support now want to distance themselves. I mean, these aren't people going out criticizing him publicly. These are people in private conversations who are huge Elon supporters wanting to distance him. And I gave that as an example.
for why Christopher said that he believed that advertisers may be taking the same stance,
and this is losing...
What does that have to do with shadow banning?
Even if the liberals turn...
Because, Sarah, it links directly to shadow banning.
Because if shadow banning's intention is to protect Twitter from content that may put advertisers off,
then that may be the answer to why it's happened again in March.
because their revenue is falling again.
Twitter is being filled with stuff that perhaps advertisers don't like.
And then suddenly, like clockwork, we see shadow banning happening again.
You're implying that it's a conservative issue, though.
You're implying that it's conservative accounts that...
No, it's content.
Look, I don't think people mind like Trump for advertisers,
but I think some of the really contentious content that Elon himself is so engaged in on a daily basis...
I think that is the content.
I tweeted earlier on, Sarah, and you just give me a perfect example.
I have some views that are conservative.
I have many views that are liberal, too.
But just because I talk about one point of view does not mean that I'm attacking one side or the other.
I consider myself centrist.
I support lots of ideas and lots of different nuances.
So, Sam, I wanted to go to Project Veritas, sorry, because I know they have to leave.
Project Veritas, how do you want to, you know, would love to get your thoughts on this.
Hey, thank you so much.
And honestly, everyone, we just believe that it's been a
An important conversation.
One tangible difference that I can say to the credit of the new regime is that we are,
we're back.
I was actually the reason why Project Veritas, why our account was banned a couple years ago.
And ironically, it was, it pertained to our investigation into Facebook.
We had a whistleblower who leaked to us recordings of their meetings with Mark Zuckerberg.
about their own form of shadow banning,
which was,
which I forgot the term that,
that they used for it,
but I ended up going up to Sunnyvale,
Sunnyvale,
California to,
to the outside, outside the residence of Guy Rosen, who's the head of Facebook's, the head of integrity at Facebook.
And I approached him with a flag mic when he was on a jog, asking him why they were talking about,
why they were talking about shadow banning comment.
It was the issue was they were hiding comments on Facebook threads.
And Twitter in turn, so we released it, he ran away from me, like a coward, ran into his house.
And then Twitter turned around and banned our account for it, saying that we doxed him.
I guess because...
if you really squinted and looked,
you could see his house number.
You couldn't see what the name of the street was
or what city it was,
but they used that as an excuse to ban our account.
So it was a very interesting case of Twitter,
colluding, almost appearing to collude with Facebook, appearing to punish us for trying to ask
Facebook, a Facebook head, a question. And then we were banned for two years. And then, of course,
Elon Musk took over, gave us our account back. I can't speak on that, you know, whether or not
It seems to me from what we're hearing is there is a lot more to investigate,
that the investigation that we started back in 2017,
you know, it may not be time to end that investigation.
And I won't say whether or not we are or are not continuing to investigate.
But this is very valuable feedback that I'm hearing from you guys.
But I will say I can speak to the fact that we at least have our account back
So the issue is like for me, go ahead, project, go ahead.
Oh, just wanted to say thank you, everybody.
And Christian just hit the nail on the head.
You know, we were distributing stories by proxy
through other users who were themselves engaged
or suffering from various levels of shadow banning.
But just want to say, add a final thought to the pot
from us here.
On March 31st, Twitter, their engineering team
published the recommendation algorithm source code.
And that's the algorithm, that's their bread and butter.
I mean, it sits through, we're talking 500 million daily tweets
that determine what you see.
And Barry Weiss's installment of the Twitter files
exposed the reputation scores that are factored into that.
I mean, we're talking, this is akin to a social credit score, right?
This is not something we want in the public domain.
So we are grateful that we've been unbanned
and we're having this conversation.
I personally speaking, I would agree with many of you who say Twitter needs work.
That's irrefutable.
But this may be the best we've got thus far.
And, you know, we can only speculate that they're acting in good faith.
While we do have to be diligent in expecting accountability from them,
we can also afford them a little bit of patience.
And with that, that's a final thought from us here.
I'm not sure if Christian is able to stay later with you all,
but we just want to say thank you on behalf of Project Veritas.
Everybody, this is important stuff.
This is our ability to speak freely.
So if you witness corruption, if you see something in your neighborhood
or the company where you work,
send us a tip.
Veritas tips at protonmail.com.
We've got a team of investigative journalists around the clock who will field those
tips and take the next steps where applicable to get the content that you need to see
to make informed decisions.
So please do send us your tips.
We'll get back to you as soon as we can.
And please.
please do feel free to make a tax deductible donation
to Project Veritas at Projectveritas.com slash donate.
Mario, thank you.
Dr. Deneesh, thank you and Suleiman.
Hopefully you get everything cleared up there
with the shadow ban.
There's more to this story, folks, like Christian said.
We've got a lot more to uncover.
So again, this is already five years in the making,
and we've come this far.
So there's more to do, and we're on it.
So thanks, everybody.
I appreciate you both coming on.
We do really appreciate, so thank you for your time.
But I just want to go back to the same point I'm saying.
Look, everybody knows when it comes to the shadow band point,
I have a severe issue I've already explained to you.
We don't know why it's happening.
My engagement has dropped significantly.
I mean, it's still much more than Sam's,
but it's dropped loads, which is not normal, right, for me.
From hundreds of thousands to like, like,
When did it start, when did that start to, when did you start to notice that?
It was halfway through my second to last post and then this last post was completely, like completely de-boasted.
And so, I mean, but the point, what doesn't make sense to me about what Sam's saying is,
his argument about why people are leaving Twitter.
Because for me, it's just clear agenda-based.
You've got a scenario where it's clear that Instagram
has been partaking in child abuse and so on and so forth.
And there's been no issue.
There's been no drama.
No advertisers are leaving.
But specifically for Elon...
It is happening.
Do we know that?
Do we know that?
I can answer that.
You want to answer that?
I'm accidentally let it out.
It's because liberals don't want to give conservatives a voice.
Well,
also just want to confirm the question that Sam was asking was like,
do we know that?
Yes,
actually mainstream media outlets have come out and condemned...
and actually spoken about the fact that Instagram was doing this.
This is not like some sort of conspiracy.
No, no. I said, do we know that advertisers are not leaving Instagram?
Salaman stated very clearly that advertisers were not leaving Instagram.
Well, so meta is a public company.
I think we would know.
And they just, now we would know on a quarterly basis,
but I'm pretty sure that we would,
there would be a lot of noise if people start leaving Instagram.
But that's a fair question.
We also, Sam, you guys are missing the explanation for all this.
Go ahead, finish.
Hold on, Darth.
Give me one more second, my friend.
But I was going to say that, you know,
we also are making a lot of judgments around Twitter
when we actually don't know
whether any of what you guys are saying is true.
Does anybody actually know what's happening
with daily active users divided by monthly active users?
Anybody know the Dow Mouse?
They don't have to disclose those anymore because they're a private company.
But I can say, I wouldn't take Elon's work for it.
From what I see, people are leaving.
That's great, Travis.
And revenue is way down.
The New York Times reported.
What we're trying here is down significantly.
But yeah, they don't have to disclose it.
Well, you're talking about marketing.
That's why they're advertising.
Exactly.
The revenue down could be advertising.
We actually don't know of Dowmows have gone down.
There's no proof that they've gone down.
In fact, yes, Elon did say that his downmouse did go up.
And he does have investors there on the platform that would hold him accountable for that.
Darth, go ahead.
All right.
So here's the thing.
This is what I feel like everybody's missing.
The answer is very obvious.
Okay.
you know Elon's more critical than anybody in business about ESG, right?
Everybody knows that.
It's pretty obvious.
The reason why everybody jumped on the fact as soon as people started mentioning something
about advertisers and bringing up the term liberal versus conservative, because liberals
because liberals care.
Because.
Because that's the ESG mafia.
Conservatives don't.
So conservative businesses will advertise in a platform and say,
I don't want my business to be advertised next to porn.
By the way, forget about separate from child porn.
Twitter is a full-on porn site.
Sometimes when I'm scrolling through videos,
I just see porn out of nowhere.
It's not labeled adults or sensitive or anything.
I just see full-on penetrative porn.
It's all over Twitter.
If you search for it, it's everywhere.
So to suggest that like you're offended by this or that,
you're offended by this or that...
You had made comments. I don't know who had said this, but there were several people who multiple times had mentioned that advertisers aren't okay with, you know, this anti-trans and LGBTQ critical stuff.
You're talking about a liberal agenda at that point. That's why politics matter, right?
So the companies who are saying, we will advertise if you have porn. We will advertise if you criticize Catholicism and Christians. We will...
advertise if you suggest that any conservative is a terrorist who deserves to be hung,
we will advertise with you for all those things.
But don't you dare think about criticizing the Alphabet Mafia.
That's why politics matter, because those businesses who are making those decisions about their
advertising dollars are doing it purely because of ESG and nothing else.
That's why Elon and Twitter will have issues with those advertisers when other platforms might not.
I mean, possibly. It is possible, but it also could be because the analytics suck.
It also could be because, I mean, have you ever done analytics on Facebook?
It's incredibly.
Well, no, I'm just talking about what they said.
They say that.
They tell us that, right?
They tell us lately on the news.
Right?
Like, maybe that's why they brought Linda on because they have to fix the back end of the entire infrastructure to allow advertisers to actually make money on this site.
Targeting on this website is absolute crap.
our advertising targeting on this website
has been completely silly.
People scroll past ads all the time.
That's why they're adding video.
There's a bunch of other reasons.
We can all try to pretend like we know,
but I'm pretty sure they know better.
Sarah, go ahead.
No, you're absolutely right.
People scroll past the ads
and they have to fix that first.
It doesn't happen on Instagram.
I stop and look at ads all the time.
I even purchase off Instagram.
I think it's less about advertisers.
But I do want to go back
to the conservative versus liberal issue.
Liberals on this platform are not driving anymore.
We aren't driving the advertisers anymore.
any longer. Elon Musk has clearly come out with a very conservative agenda. He has removed the bans off several conservative accounts. I see a couple up here that are speaking that have said they were banned until Elon.
He has clearly made a conservative agenda.
I don't buy the fact that now he would say that he's going to change his advertising model because liberals may be offended at having their ads next to porn.
They have...
Wait, Sarah, let me push the back on the actual...
It's more about the companies advertising, not the individual liberals on Twitter.
It's the actual companies we're talking about.
Let's let Sarah finish and then you guys can jump in.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Finish your point.
20 seconds.
Gotcha.
Thanks, Sam.
It's less about...
Not very liberal of thumb there, is it?
Go ahead, Tara.
Yeah.
It's less about, I think, a political ideology and more about it is still Twitter 1.0.
It is not Twitter 2.0. Not much has changed, except now people are paying attention thanks to the Twitter files.
All right, Sarah, I want to push back on what you said.
First of all, a ton has changed.
Twitter is 100 times better, and no, it's not perfect.
Whoever, I think it was Project Veracos said that before.
It's 100 times better.
I got my account back.
Tons of people had before.
There were a lot of people who were banned for saying something, even milk toasts,
slightly critical about Ukraine,
questioning the election,
things that, you know,
everybody else has been doing for decades,
about every election,
and we were banned permanently.
It was absurd.
My issue with what you just said is when you say
he came in with a conservative agenda
by bringing back conservative accounts,
I would counter...
That's not a conservative agenda.
He's just taking it from a hundred percent liberal echo chamber and making it a little more even by allowing people to come back who didn't actually do anything that deserved a lifetime ban in the first place.
What's the point when he is now shadow banning those same accounts?
What's the point?
They might as well still be suspended if they have...
But there is an argument that it's happening on the other side.
It's a much smaller scale.
Actually, hold on, hold on.
I want to take a second.
I want people to understand what Sarah's main point is for our audience.
I know you all do.
But for our audience, the point that Sarah's trying to make,
I'm going to mansplain for a second.
The point is she's trying to, I'm just kidding.
I adore you.
Go ahead.
The point that she's making.
And it's been a point that we've been trying to make for the last, like, hour and a half.
But, you know, people that just cannot imagine in their heart of hearts that Elon can ever be wrong about anything are unwilling to admit that there's no difference between being banned.
and being completely shadow banned where people can't search you,
where people don't see your tweets, where your activity is zero,
it is the exact same thing.
Sam, I'll let you respond.
There is an alternative theory that would also make sense,
because as I said, people actually from both sides,
I'll be very specific on LGT, I can't even say it, you know what I mean.
People on both sides are saying,
that they're seeing shadow bands.
So it may be that those are topics
that advertisers aren't comfortable with.
And whether it's pro or against,
because I did find some data Googling
that came from a recent Forbes article
that says that there was a presentation,
an internal presentation
which seven employees confirmed
that have said that Twitter revenue is down, you know, 60% from this time last year.
So obviously when Elon first took over, he said they were pushing towards break-even,
revenue is up, but it seems to have gone the other way.
So it may be that they're shadow-blaming topics rather than the falls in the banks.
I just want to correct one thing.
He never said that revenue was up.
He said that profitability was up.
And there are a lot.
Fair point. Fair point.
There's a pretty big difference.
Sorry.
No, you're right.
You're right.
It's a fair point.
So is this individuals being targeted because of their politics or is this topics being targeted because advertisers don't want to advertise on these contentious topics.
So whether you're pro a contentious topic or anti-a-contentious topic, I think that's probably more what's happening.
And the evidence seems to suggest that.
I mean, we're acting like these topics aren't being talked about on other platforms.
Maybe not at this level.
But, Darth, I want to give you a chance to jump in.
Yeah, so one thing on what you just said.
So the topics you're referring to, this has always been the issue.
Those topics where they have issues, this is why I brought up ESG and, you know, the liberal agenda running these.
The.
The topics I'm advertising next to are...
It's like dead naming, right?
Like Tim Poole said on Joe Rogan,
it was absurd to suggest,
well, no, there's nothing to do with politics.
We're not banning conservatives.
We're just banning people who don't, you know,
who use people's dead names.
Okay, every single human being
who doesn't respect someone's pronouns
and uses their dead name is a conservative.
So it is indeed political
when you're talking about those topics
that they consider offensive
when it's specifically...
When it's specifically a topic...
And adherence of political...
Dark, your audio is complete crap.
Okay, we heard the main point just though.
Wait, is that better?
I can't hear you anymore.
Am I better now?
Yeah, I think you were getting a phone call.
Do you want to finish real quick?
Yeah, yeah, real quick.
So, yeah, same thing that Tim Poole said on Rogan,
when you're talking about topics,
when adherence to one political philosophy
believe in that topic and that topic alone,
and the other side doesn't,
then it's still political,
even if they're claiming its particular topics
when it actually is indeed political.
But what you said about...
how there's no difference between being banned and chattel band.
There's a huge difference for a couple of reasons.
I was banned off the platform for two and a half years from this account
because they didn't like the fact that I helped save Kyle Rittenhouse's life.
That offended them, so they banned me.
They banned me on another account for criticizing Ukraine.
I couldn't go on the platform at all.
So if I was ShadowBan right now,
which is a short-term thing,
it's not permanent.
For people who are dealing with it,
I get that it sucks.
My reach was reduced
when I did the Trump thread,
which went viral.
It had 2 million impressions
in like 12 hours.
Then they suspended me.
It took me two days
to get a human appeal
to restore my account.
So I didn't have to delete anything.
But it took two days
while my...
my, the spread of my content completely died.
It would have been viral, but it completely died.
Every single big account was sharing it.
Donald Trump Jr. was sharing it.
Like, it was insane.
Right.
And then it completely died.
It's so, but it's temporary.
Like, I get it.
I mean, look, this is, the issue is this.
I mean, on this point, I mean, on this point, I mean, I don't agree with Sam on the
comparison point.
Well, in terms of this point, I agree with Donish, look,
To be shadow band, why are we on Twitter?
It's not because we want to just write and nobody reads it.
Because if you want that, you can send someone a WhatsApp message.
You can write it in your notes.
You could do some other things.
The reason you're on Twitter, any form of social media, is you want to write something
and you want as many people as possible to read it.
Darth keeps talking about how many, how well some of his threads have done,
because he wants to advertise the...
fact that he's doing threads that other people are reading.
That matters to all of us.
That's the reason we're here, right?
It matters to me.
I'm not insulting to Daph.
Like, I don't want to write something that only has like, you know, Sam's level of reach.
I want to write something that has a decent, really good reach.
Yeah.
No, you're right.
You're right.
I was legit, like, seriously depressed.
Yeah.
No, no joke.
I was, like, legitimately depressed when that thread just got killed.
I was, yeah, yeah.
So my point is this.
When you're getting Shadow Band, that has a huge impact.
And we don't know the level of impact it has from a...
you know from a consecutive sorry compound perspective so now i've been shadow banned does that
mean that as soon as i'm unshadowband my reach goes automatically to the high level
of the reach i had before or does it now slowly start upscaling again so what kind of impact does
they have is it compound on top of that as well you've got scenarios where certain topics are
I'll shadow you get shadow ban for.
And certain topics, even community notes is,
community note on certain topics and certain not.
So when you see all of this,
it does look like huge amount of censorship.
So I,
that's where I have a problem.
But Gail, I know you disagree.
So please let me,
please give the other side and let us.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Did you say Gail?
As in Gail B?
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
I've pronounced it right.
Thank you.
Oh, I love this space.
I'm so glad I got invited.
You guys are so, like, talking so with so much passion.
Like, it's beautiful to hear this Twitter space.
So I will be very brief because I took notes while you wonderful people were talking.
I...
think, I think there are a ton of skeletons in the closet that Elon probably doesn't even know about them all deep in the code from Twitter 1.0 that need to be dug out of the skeleton closet and need to be, you know, recoded. That's what I think. I think there's also, so that's my point one. Point two I have is I think there are bots that are affecting when, when,
I think there's bot activity that is affecting view count.
Okay.
This is something also that I think that Elonx.corp, Twitter 2.0 is working on.
It's still a company in its infancy.
It's like a brand new, fresh startup, you guys.
It has to kind of reboot, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Okay, so the next thing, I'm just going to be so brief with you guys, but I have noticed, this is something I noticed, is that certain accounts, and I think this is happening to some of you, some of your tweets are going viral and some are just completely seemed to be suppressed.
Okay.
So I feel what I've noticed is that tweets that are more controversial, maybe more, more, more right-leaning sometimes.
Okay.
end up going more viral. Now, I'm sure some of you will disagree with me, but I notice there's this unusual activity. I think it's sabotage. I think it's some sort of possible sabotage to make Twitter fail to somehow say, oh, gosh, it's gone full on, you know, right wing.
I mean, it is also possible, Gail, that there are more right-wing people that are engaging with it.
We don't have data on whether the daily active utilization of people that are conservative
is higher on Twitter than people that are liberal.
Maybe people that are liberal have some sort of fatigue from Twitter.
I mean, it is totally possible.
Will we fair to say, Darnish, that the right-wing content is, and I'm not saying this across the board,
but I'm saying the stuff that's getting high engagement.
Right.
is deliberately designed to cause outrage, which is such a strong human emotion.
Right, and that shouldn't be happening.
I think bots could be contributing to that, because Tritter really the goal is to,
okay, so let's move on to the last thing I have to say, I believe,
and I've seen y'all screenshots of analysts, you went to an analytical type platform
to get proof that you've been banned and all this, but I,
This is just my suggestion.
I could be totally wrong, okay?
But my suggestion is create some screenshots of your tweets that you feel have been suppressed.
And then ones from your same accounts that did not seem to be suppressed.
If you can show there's a difference in the view count numbers,
You show that, tweet that, tweet that to Twitter engineering,
tweet it to Elon, tag Elon in those tweets.
But I think it is, Gail, and I want to ask this question to Alex, actually,
give you a chance to back your boy, Elon up, Alex.
But basically, the question is this.
there is nothing you can do.
Like literally, I, if I had somewhere I can literally write and, you know,
apply and have some kind of situation.
I said, look, I've been shadow banned.
Can you rectify?
Because errors can occur.
They could be all code.
These things could be the case.
If it could be as easy as me sending an email,
because tagging Elon is not going to work.
Millions of people tag Elon, I'm guessing,
because they're hoping for the dream that maybe Elon, you know,
retweets it or replies or whatever it may be.
So...
I mean, that's what I think you need.
But, Alex, I'll let you jump in
and look to hear your overall thoughts as well.
That'd be brilliant.
Yeah, sorry.
I got a phone call earlier when I was going to jump in.
But to Gail's point about...
a lot of right wing content, getting a lot of engagement.
I think it's because it generates conversation a lot.
And, you know, even if you're on the left and you're replying to something,
the algorithm is going to feed you more of that stuff regardless of if you agree with it or not.
Say if I reply to Joe Biden's tweet a hundred times.
I don't like Joe Biden, but I'm going to start seeing his tweets in my feed.
To your point about...
about shadow bands and stuff.
I have seen a resurgence in issues
and people saying that they have been seeing
that their accounts are shadow band.
And I think someone mentioned this earlier
that the third party apps
might not be 100% accurate,
but I do see screenshots of people
not seeing their accounts in the search.
And what I've seen recently as well
is that in some of these cases that they're still applying account level shadow bands say if you if you tweet sensitive content um for example there was uh that that french stabbing of the the children at the playground i saw a few accounts tweet that um
And then as a result, their account became shadow-bent in a week after that.
But there are examples also of people tweeting certain things and talking about certain topics
where they did not release sensitive content.
And clearly their engagement has gone down.
I'm going to talk about some, like some basic topics, like any sort of counter of, and by the way, people don't know, but I'm pretty liberal, actually, in my politics, so you can understand.
But, you know, certain people that are talking about, you know, Zionism or about Israel or about anything that can be taken as potentially speaking against, you know, there's been some conversation around.
other topics about Muslims or about,
there's like certain topics that have just become completely different
without any sensitive content being attributed to it.
You know, I did want to kind of get your thoughts on
how is this any different...
Then Twitter 1.0.
And the point that we've been making is,
I have called into question.
I love your thoughts on this specific question.
People keep talking about,
and Elon keeps talking about,
that it's very, you know,
you have freedom of speech,
but you don't have freedom of reach.
If you, if nobody sees any of your tweets, how is that any different than you writing in a note or going in a WhatsApp or doing something else?
Why the hell are we all on Twitter is to engage with others in conversation?
If you can't do that, that isn't Elon doing the same thing that other people were doing before him.
A couple points.
One, I will be the first to say that Twitter is not perfect right now.
And, uh,
Elon openly admits to this, Twitter employees openly admit to this.
What I will say, though, is the difference between Twitter 2.0 and Twitter 1.0 is when these problems arise, they're more...
more of data points rather than, you know, something that's going to be swept under the rug
because when enough attention is brought upon issues, there's engineers that want to fix
this stuff and that there is a willingness to fix this type of stuff.
To your point about the freedom of speech, not reach policy, that's actually something
that will be implemented at a tweet level basis rather than account level.
level basis. So I actually had a meeting with somebody who was kind of high up at Twitter with trust and safety.
And their entire point behind that policy, it's not fully rolled out yet, was to actually get rid of shadow bands at an account level.
Meaning that you're not going to be delisted and blacklisted for, say, like my example, if you posted that French whatever.
that individual piece of content would have, you know, the reach reduced and it wouldn't be recommended because it includes violence.
But how does that fit what he said in the beginning? I remember it's as if it was yesterday when we were all sitting here talking about how bad the old regime was with Twitter files.
Remember those communists who were doing this? And suddenly you couldn't talk about the vaccine. You couldn't talk about all these different issues.
But now suddenly it's okay for them to shadow ban you if you talk about a specific topic.
That's a debate.
That's a debate we can have.
He also did say that he would like it in line with the law.
And one could say, and this was actually the case in that the specific incidents I'm talking about, is that the French law, it said withheld by French law.
And that's why that thing was taken down.
But what about, again, the example I gave, which again has occurred to somebody who's up here on stage.
Okay.
So this is not like just a made-up example.
What about that?
Suddenly, you can't speak out against another government.
Even if I agree with some of the things that were happening or somebody else disagrees,
I think in the U.S., there's no law against speaking against a foreign government, at least to my knowledge.
What was the specific example you gave?
I'm sorry, I missed the example.
Somebody spoke up against some policies against Israel specifically.
And what was done?
And they've seen their engagement go down.
It has been in shadow ban for months.
I mean, there are several countries in the EU, for example, where there are laws against
certain speech, anti-Semitism.
I'd be interested for us to take this, particularly with Alex speaking, particularly I understand,
I appreciate that.
And this is why when it's algorithm-based, you can't see the nuance.
You don't know whether it's positive or negative, so they may say we just don't want
any discussion of those subjects.
But while Alex is here, be interested to know, Alex, what do you think about
advertiser influence. You know, if an advertiser says, look, we're really uncomfortable
with all of this debate on this particular subject, whether it's pro or anti, and, you know,
we've seen that the revenues have fallen like 60% over year over year, over last 12 months.
Do you think that advertisers may be having a hand in this thing, look, Elon, we're going
to pull even more of our advertising revenue if your platform is dominated by these issues,
these subjects that we're not comfortable with? So,
So to address the previous point, and then I'll go to what your question was, I was kind of asking, how do you know that that specific piece of content was responsible for the account being shadow band?
That's what my question was.
But to address what you just said and your question is...
the thing that they're trying to implement to
make advertisers
feel better about
advertising on Twitter is better
adjacency targeting.
So you can allow all of the
content you want on Twitter, but it
doesn't mean you have the freedom to have
advertising appear next to it and make money off of it.
If it's not, and this is the same for any other platform or whatever,
if it's not advertiser-friendly, you're not going to be
monetizing on it. So I
I think that's more of the argument that they need to talk to external advertisers about and ensure that their ads aren't going to be placed next to, say, porn or whatever.
So it's it's all about increasing their adjacency targeting and those types of controls that they have over their own platform.
and that's something that they really need to work on.
But that's where I feel like the divide needs to be,
rather than saying all content on this platform is advertiser-friendly.
So look, I want to jump in because Sam kind of like...
brushed it off.
Let's be clear.
There is a clear biases or agenda that's going on.
It seems like it from the face of it.
Now, it may not be case.
Everything may be coincidental as well.
This is highly possible.
But you essentially have a scenario where if you are
against Israel as example Danjave.
I know at least two of the people or three of the people
who have posted above in my post spoke about that
and they have been shadow banned.
For months and months, you can't even check their handle.
On the other hand, from the other side, no problem.
People's accounts are not banned.
Even Doc was about to come up.
He was banned either for one or two issues.
Either it was his space about this issue
or it was about his LGBTQ post.
Then on top of that, I see on Twitter a clear scenario where there is lack of consistency.
For example, you had people who are banned for certain things, you know, Yard and these type of people.
But then at the same time, I've seen people do the vilest Islamophobia and then they're not banned.
You also have a scenario where you've got examples of Elon Musk.
He...
posts and comments on people with specific perspectives.
And we know when Elon posts, it's not a normal person posting.
I'm not trying to say he shouldn't be allowed to post,
but he knows when he posts it automatically boost it.
So hence why sometimes he'll just do an exclamation map.
Sometimes you'll do like an emoji.
He's not adding to the conversation.
It's boosting it.
And he's boosting things like, for example, in my view, that caused racial division.
So whenever someone's posting about, for example, black people doing crimes in the United States,
I'm sorry I'm being like straight up about this, but it'll get boosted significantly.
And that causes racial division in America.
And people assume, because most people are not smart, obviously that's not his fault.
That's what he says is gospel.
Right.
So again, when you got the...
And he's not doing it from the other side.
Like, he's picked the crust and sees on a few other people,
but they're not the other side.
They're almost in the middle, all these people.
You're not having somebody who's completely under the perspective.
And he would never comment on somebody
who was far on a different position on the spectrum.
I don't want to give my own example
because then it looks like I'm begging for him to follow me.
That's not my point.
Someone who's got more, like...
For example, let's be someone who pro-Palestinian, he would not follow them and comment on this.
I'm just giving this example.
This is one example.
I don't want to get fixated on this Israel-Palestan example or Islamophobia and non-Islamphobic example.
I'm just given some examples.
So when you look at it, there is a huge issue of who's getting shadow banned, who's getting banned and who's not.
But do we know that for a fact lame or is that, because you've obviously experienced it personally right now.
So you're making, you know, broad statements.
But if you sat in a room with people maybe on the other side of the LGBTQ debate, for example,
they would probably tell you they'd experience the saying there are articles I found during the spaces
where LGBTQ websites are saying we've experienced a huge increase in shadow banning on our Twitter accounts.
since the end of March,
which is exactly what people on the other side of the debate is saying.
So again, I think it may not be a bias.
I think it may be a topic-based thing
rather than that Elon's picking site.
Sam, let's assume it will be a topic-based thing.
It won't be every topic.
This is my point.
It's certain topics and a certain sides of a topic.
So I know, for example...
I've just said that I don't think...
I just said that you are experiencing that.
You're experiencing it personally.
I understand it.
But how many people...
How many LGBT proponents have you sat down and asked if they've experienced it?
As an example, we have clear examples of, for example, you're getting banned.
And then I saw massive people, for example, destiny, pearly things.
And it was almost like five, six of them were basically proliferating the internet with high levels of Islamophobia.
So I'm not talking about some minor comment because obviously those could be missed with 600,000 followers, million followers, 200,000 followers, wherever it may be.
And that wasn't banned.
Now, I'm saying I'm not bothered.
I'm not crying about Islamophobia.
I'm saying consistency.
Like, either ban it all.
You make a really fair point and I think that needs to be investigated further because
anti-Semitism could bankrupt Elon because of some EU laws where if he allows anti-Semitism on the platform,
so he ban Ye.
He should allow everything or allow nothing.
That's my point.
No, but I agree with you, Slaman, that may have been a commercial decision because it's absolutely abhorrent to think of Islamophobia as well.
So I'm 100% with you there.
If those accounts aren't being targeted, but anti-Semitism is purely for commercial reasons, then that's wrong.
But does anybody see the irony here?
Are we seeing any of the iron here?
Hold on.
I agree with you.
Commercial reasons.
I don't continue.
Because is that one, hold on, hold on.
So is it okay?
You know, we can't sit here and try to act like it's okay for one side to do one thing.
and be criticized for it.
And then another, somebody else comes on board,
acts like the Savior,
acts like he's going to change everything,
acts like he's better than, you know, better than everybody else.
And he's this incredible leader that's going to come in
and be all about free speech.
And then ultimately end up failing in the exact,
maybe in a different way, let's say.
But having the same impact.
I'll let Joe jump in, Sam.
Yes, I'm like a mother.
Go ahead, Joe.
Yeah, Donish, I don't think you're being 100% fair.
Like, while I agree with you, I think Tesla still uses a bunch of petroleum, for example, and he's also involved in launching rockets.
And the whole point of Tesla was to reduce humans' population dependency on petroleum, as he once stated in the beginning.
Yeah.
He just bought Twitter.
Like, give this man a chance to, like, fix the boat.
But, you know what I mean?
Like, steer it in the right direction.
Things are getting better.
I think it's a process.
I think it takes time.
I think there's still things that need to be fixed.
I think he does.
He is offering more transparency.
The problem I see is anyone who thinks this is going to be a equal for all platform
Must be smoking like I must be doing a-a-waska every weekend and hoping we all become kumbaya because the
The advertisers
Then he shouldn't have said it. He shouldn't have said it. He shouldn't have acted like he was holier than thou
I don't believe Elon even bought Twitter for those reasons. I believe I
Elon was one of the most harmful.
Twitter was one of the most harmful places for Elon.
It's where his companies, vast amounts of misinformation
was spread about Tesla and about him personally.
Twitter was a hugely harmful place,
but it was also places where he was attacked by, you know,
far-left Democrats like Bernie Sanders, et cetera,
and he had his taxes questions.
He was basically forced through huge pressure to pay billions of dollars of taxes.
that he didn't want to pay...
I said this a thousand times.
Yeah, I don't believe he bought Twitter for the idealistic reasons.
No, he bought it for X.com.
And I told Mario on the space...
I don't believe he bought it for X.com.
I believe...
And it was one of the most popular...
It was one of the most popular posts that he had
when I said Twitter was cheap.
The price was cheap.
You know why?
Because...
Most of the time when you buy a financial, when you acquire customers, you're paying a very hefty price for them.
I think for Twitter, it wound up being like 30 bucks a customer, which is super cheap.
And if he implements X.com, which he already has made those moves.
And I was saying this as soon as he bought it.
He's now changed Twitter to X and he's input.
You're already talking about bringing on, I forget the social trading platform or whatever.
He's making all the moves to make it into a financial platform.
And that is cheap.
Commercial, Joe.
I don't believe it.
I think there's a lot of heart and soul in this from Elon, a lot of bitterness, which I think was justified.
He was attacked by the sort of far left.
Yeah.
And he was pressured into paying billions of dollars of taxes and realizing options he didn't want to, this, that, you know, there was a whole story going back five or six years.
Yeah, Sam, his actions have not lived up to that. Doc, go ahead.
Yeah, I just want to push back on Sam a little bit.
Sam, you started part of his conversation by saying that back in the day,
Twitter was a favorable place for Elon because Twitter, or excuse me, Tesla,
had so many fans on here and you attributed to drop.
That's not what I said at all, but you can.
Okay. Well, then you didn't know.
I said that the people who were on here were being supported.
I didn't say that Twitter was necessarily a favorite.
People were on here fighting fud.
Twitter was full of misinformation.
Let me just finish my point, okay?
I've been listening for a while.
So, yeah, I, too, am Shadowband.
I had the sort of usual experience that Conservatives had.
I had a camp starting in 2012.
Got banned in 2018 for same sort of stuff I'm talking about now.
Conservative politics and conservative medicine.
And Elon restored my account in March 7th of this year.
Account went from 3,000 to 15,000 in the two months since then.
And about, oh, I would say two weeks ago, I realized that I was shadow banned.
All my numbers started to drop.
And there were two situations that myself and others feel
are probably the target of that shadow banning.
One was my participation in a room with a lot of Muslims
who discussed their religion and their faith
and the attacks on it.
Two was the space I decided to hold
as effectively a mediator between friends
who are Jewish and or Zionists and my Muslim friends.
And so those two things might have attributed to my shadow band.
It's probably more likely.
Someone at Twitter literally an individual person was monitoring you to be able to do that?
No, I'm not paranoid.
I think there's automated processes that probably did that to me and Suleiman and Kalee and a number of the Muslims that were in that space.
And the second thing that might have gotten my attention was that I posted...
some pictures of post-surgical procedures on trans patients.
And, but I did not receive a warning.
I did not receive a strike.
When I post, I'm shadow banned based on these social blade and these other accounts that track shadow banning.
But I'm also having a problem as compared to the posts on Twitter API and on the PC.
Whenever I tweet on the PC, every single post I get gets a content warning.
which I can appeal.
There's a process for me to appeal.
But this is every tweet.
A picture of me on Father's Day with my kids when they were three and four got the same warning.
So every time I appeal that morning, and not once have I received any response.
I have reached out and received responses from Twitter Blue and Twitter Safety.
And the responses after they reviewed my tweets,
in question and said that this is not something that we in Twitter blue or Twitter safety can deal with.
And that's it. So I share the frustration. I am one of those people that have really, really hardcore
supported Elon. And I still do. But there's more here to this than just the, in my opinion, than just old code.
or old employees.
Can I ask you a question?
Sure.
If you, let's say there's an advertiser that likes the topic Sam is talking on,
doesn't like the topic that you're talking on.
Should Elon, as a business owner, accelerate Sam's content so he gets more advertising,
decelerate yours.
And this is why I'm saying people who think it's going to be absolutely equal for all,
or smoke or smoke and crack because that's not going to happen as a business he's dependent on advertisers
probably not and he is going to be dependent on advertisers until it hits a certain gross growth
level right and i think that's why x.com works he doesn't he can become truly free i think i think
i think doc and salaman are both right believe it or not i think that they both in shadow band
for lgbq content and the reason i don't think
it's a one-sided thing is I've been Googling throughout this, as I said before.
There are actually several articles now.
I found one here on the pink news.com that was published on April the 1st saying that many of their community were being shadow banned for using LGBTQ expressions like trans in their post.
So again, I don't think, I think you're probably correct.
It is probably that that caused your shadow ban.
But what I'm saying is I don't think there's a bias that they're saying, oh, he's against this or he's for it.
I think it's a topic-based thing that perhaps their advertisers have given them feedback on.
But when that happened in previous accounts, in between the time that I got my account,
back in the account when it was
banned. I had 17 different accounts.
I used and I got banned consistently.
But see, I'm not tweeting about
in my mind. And I
hope Elon is listening or someone gets at him on this.
I have no problem with LGBT.
None.
I never have.
I'm on the record of being pro-gay marriage.
I have gay relatives.
It's not an issue for me.
I never attack gays.
I never attack lesbians.
I never attack bisexuals.
I attack people who are promoting trans agenda for children.
That's it, period.
End the story.
And if that's getting de-boasted, I have a big fucking problem with Elon.
I think that is the key words.
It's in this article.
It's in this article.
It's still against the rules.
Read the Twitter rules.
If you're posting post on the picture.
I wanted to get back in their consent and the intent to be transphobic, that's against the rules.
But I am saying here, accounts are against the rules.
So pro trans accounts are also reporting BAN.
So I think we just need to emphasize that.
I don't think this is a thing personally against you, Dorcas de layman.
I wanted to bring you in.
And then we'll go to Alex.
Yeah, it seems that the simple answer here is just to give advertisers the tools to figure out where they want their content to show up.
And the common thing about all these big tech companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter, is that they never implement these tools.
They just say, well, we don't, as a blanket statement, we don't want their ads to show up with LGBT-related content or, you know, anti-LGBQ related content.
And the thing is, is that if these advertisers have these tools, they would use them, right?
Like, it's a very simple solution.
Right.
You know, we have to start asking the question.
Like, are they deliberately not giving these tools
so that they can have the problem
that they are giving this blanket solution to?
I mean, I just want to jump in here
because Joe is right in what he's saying
and so is Sam.
But just think about what they're actually saying.
And they're saying that, look, for commercial reasons...
That's the reason why certain people or certain topics have been shadow banned.
For commercial reasons, for advertisers, that's the reason why.
I don't think that's the case.
I don't think that's the case yet.
Right now, I still think it's old Twitter.1, but I do believe that will be the case.
Okay.
So let's say it is the case, but some people think it is the case right now and you think it's the case in the future.
But just think about what you're saying.
This was the main complaint about Twitter 1.0
that they were basically coutowing to the advertisers and essentially moderating, blocking, banning and shadowing people for.
for that specific reason.
So what has changed?
And in terms of LGBTQ,
the issue is this.
If it's some kind of algorithm
that's being used,
that's fine.
There should be a process in place
to talk about it
because I'm very careful with my words.
I'm not transphobic.
I actually,
in these panels,
I step.
stand up for people who are being attacked if they're biological males
and are transgender because I believe that they get attacked more than anybody else.
If you look at my post, they're specifically about LGBDQ and sex education,
heterosexual sex education, in schools for kids who are too young.
That's what my argument's been.
So if you look at my post, none of those posts have that, don't have transphobia or anything like that.
Now, let's say it's an algorithm.
Why hasn't Elon just done the specific move?
of putting something in place,
very simple that I could just go and say,
look, this has been incorrect.
My shadow band was done by algorithm.
Click.
Please sort.
Someone reviews, it automatically reviews,
and it gets sorted out.
Why has that not been done?
And we're all being censored.
That's the problem I have that.
I'm being censored.
Either based on old code,
or it's based on a new agenda
or new advertisers.
We don't know,
because we don't know any of that information.
We don't even know if we're being shadow band.
Alex, I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Yes.
Let me go to Alex.
Alex.
Yeah, so I'm just trying to understand the, this is not for you specifically, for a couple people I've heard.
I've heard that Elon boosts this content, but then also...
saying that he's trying to suppress it.
If it was for advertising reasons, I think he would be less vocal on it.
For example, like the trans issue, he literally tweeted, quote,
any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they're consenting adults should go to prison for life.
I don't think if he was like, if, again,
And I'm not saying Twitter is perfect.
This could be a criticism of, you know, the algorithm or the people who are actually taking action.
But like, I don't, I don't think Elon is, like, doing this on purpose.
purpose you know what i mean like that makes sense but then what about the second part marg unless it's
happening automatically some old code in there that correct why hasn't you just put something in place
that all these shadow band accounts who are talking about issues that previously were banned to talk about
we can't talk about it because we're all going to get shadow band and viewership of i was going from
like my view like my post on the lgpq got a million and then this recent what in schools and in
this recent one got like 7000
Correct. I agree with that. And what I think I would say is that
The problem with the shadow banning and the way that it was done is that there isn't a switch that you can just flip off all shadow banning.
If you've seen the screenshots from when they did the Twitter files with like Charlie Kirk or Dan Bongino, those labels are like applied at the account level.
And I don't know if there's an automatic process of like if it detects it and then it automatically gets applied or if like a human has to go and apply them.
So you.
Yes, whatever the process is for that, I think it needs to be undone.
And like I mentioned at the beginning of the space when I jumped on is
Their goal, and I don't know the timeline on this, is to take that off completely.
And I know it's not a perfect solution to stifle an individual tweet,
but I do think the transparency there is much better than what's going on right now
or what you guys are saying is going on, not knowing if you're shadow banned,
why you're shadow banned.
But for example, like the example I gave...
If there is a controversy over children being stabbed and Twitter not wanting to circulate that content, at least you know the piece of content that's your is being suppressed and that it's that individual piece of content rather than like what you say, you're speaking on certain topics and then you're finding your entire account is being suppressed.
And that's the thing.
the lack of transparency on these things is the exact issue.
But that's what they're trying to work towards.
They can't just flip a switch and do it.
But like I agree that it is a continuing problem.
But that's like I said, I had an hour long meeting with a dude that's pretty high up with trust and safety.
And I have that same question.
I don't know who's in charge of trust and safety right now.
I don't know if there is a replacement at the moment.
And that could be, you know, leading to the issue of,
Like, the void hasn't been filled for two weeks of, you know, who's in charge.
That could be part of the issue.
I don't know.
But I do know that from my meeting, that's what I was told,
is that they're trying to completely eradicate the idea of shadow banning at an account level altogether.
You know, something changed recently that we all were talking about a few weeks ago.
And I would be a really bad host.
or co-host if I didn't bring it up,
which was that there was a change in leadership.
I hate to be that person,
but it's time to put on your tinfoil hats, y'all.
Darth, tell me whether that has had an impact.
Do you think that Linda coming up and joining Twitter has had an impact?
And maybe that's why we're seeing an increase in terms of enforcement recently.
Yeah, that was one of the few things.
You broke up, Doth.
Yeah, I don't hear dark thing.
I should be good now, right?
Well, Donish just poured flames on it, so now he just put...
Am I okay now?
My wife called.
I just ignored it.
put decisions that off
you know the most important things in life
go ahead so the
um the end all end are coming on the timing of that
with the increase in shadow banning
absolutely there's a correlation i'm not saying it's a causal
relationship but the correlation with
specifically with this type of shadow banning
certainly aligns that's definitely something that should
be brought up with respect to the things
that suleman said a couple things so i dropped
two things up top i pinned a couple things
one a list of things that go along with
exactly what he said uh
where I just kind of gave advice to Elon.
I know he's never going to read it,
but enough people follow me
who know him,
maybe somebody else,
who knows.
But one of the things I suggested
is if you're paying $8 for Twitter,
Blue, there should be an easy system in place.
Transparency, like Alex was saying,
is key.
They need to be transparent.
And if you're paying for the service,
you shouldn't be subject to these rules.
If you want to do that to unpaid members,
fine,
but,
If you're paying $8 a month, if you're being shadow bad, they should tell you why.
They should give you some sort of avenue to appeal it.
And worst case, if you can't appeal it, they should at least say it's going to stay in your account for X number of days as long as you don't violate this set of policies.
That's something that absolutely has to happen.
And one of the other things that Tillamann mentioned that I wanted to comment on.
As a conservative Ashkenazi Jew, I did this post where I pinned it up top.
You can see it.
Where I specifically was really critical of Elon,
and one of the things that bothers me the most about the freedom of speech ideology he claims to espouse
is the policy against denying historical events like Sandy Hook or the Holocaust.
And I wrote this whole tirade where I went off.
And I'm like, you know, I don't care as 100% purebred Ashkenazi Jew if...
If somebody makes Holocaust jokes, and I might not think it's funny, but I don't want somebody to lose the ability to speak over it.
And when it comes to just being critical of Israel, I've helped so many people appeal suspensions.
There's only a couple times where they always get denied and they can't help them.
One is if they threaten somebody or...
or promoted violence.
Two, if they broke the law, three, platform manipulation using bots or spam mechanisms
to disrupt the platform.
And the other one, which doesn't appear in their terms of service, is saying something
that triggers specifically the Jewish community.
That's something that's like a no-go zone.
So I've had people where they blatantly didn't violate the rule.
I will take it.
excerpts for their appeal. I write their appeal for them. I take an excerpt from the terms of service.
I paste Elon and Ella when she was still the heads own tweets talking about what constitutes a
violation and what doesn't. And that will be included in the appeal. Any other topic, it would get
overturned when I put the appeal in those terms. If it's something where they were critical of
Israel or saying something that could be construed as anti-Semitic, even if it's not, it always
gets rejected and I can help.
no matter what I put, however I write the appeal.
So there are certain...
protected groups and it's just absurd.
On last comment,
somebody mentioned how in the terms of service,
you still can't criticize trans or whatever.
That's not entirely true.
I do it all the time.
I'll be heavily critical of that community.
It's very specific now.
They have fixed that.
You can't specifically attack a person.
So I got suspended for saying, you know,
transgenderism is a mental illness, right?
I appealed it, instantly rejected by the body.
appealed it a second time and finally got to a human, and it got overturned.
All I had to do is explain, I didn't tag anybody, I wasn't responding to a specific person,
I didn't claim that they suffered from any sort of illness, I didn't say anything derogatory,
so if it's not targeted, and then Elon went further and said it has to be excessive, repeated, and unrecipricated.
So while it may still appear technically in the terms, you can easily get a suspension overturned if you know the terms of service well and you're able to frame the appeal in that way.
So it is a lot more free speech than it used to be for sure.
But yeah, there are major issues now and I really hate the idea that you can't talk about certain taboo topics like Sandy Hooker or the Holocaust is totally absurd.
Let me go to Bubet.
Bubet, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been looking into this manner or you've researched this manner.
So please tell us, and specifically about Shadow Band.
So please tell us, give us more information about how it works.
Yeah, hey, everyone.
So you have a great chat until now.
You have some good topics about...
Freedom of speech and if you get banned so easily,
why is that even a thing?
And I totally agree with that.
And to be honest, the fact that Iloni is asking for $8 in order for you to be able to
sew your tweets is absurd.
And when you can get banned, as someone mentioned right now.
But the thing is, like, I think as I think Sam was the one who said that,
it's about politics.
Like when you talk about politics, most of the times...
it helps you get satir band.
Also, because you don't know who you interact with,
like you can not tell if somebody else is sarobans.
If you interact with those accounts, you're most likely to get bands.
For me, like, I apologize and I'm the co-host.
I'm Shadow Band.
If you all get Shadow Band, it's not my fault.
Continue, Buby.
It's your fault.
It's the same.
We're all fucked now.
We have like, like, half the people up here are Shadow Band.
What, there's like 10,000 people in this room.
We're all going to be Shadow Band.
All right.
It's fine.
It's over.
It's over, then.
But, yeah.
No, so if you interact along, if you, uh,
reply with accounts or satir band. It might help you get banned as well.
Another thing is that I saw some scripts that you have up there and that you use some sites.
There is another ban that I figured out a couple of days ago. And basically you get banned
without even knowing. No tracking sites can track that ban. And the only way for you to
see if you're a ban or not is...
is by getting on another account that is not following you
and going on a comment that you did on another people's tweets
and check that you comment it and check if your comments appear under the tweets
if it doesn't and if it's in the so more comment section
then you are you have that kind of band and basically what that ban is
so accounts that do not follow you are not going to see your tweets
are not going to see your replies
And on top of that, your tweets are going to get 90% less engagement, 90% less views on them.
And...
I don't know if you talked about that already,
but that's something that is out there right now as we speak.
I think it's like two weeks since the first introduction like I saw in the space.
And to me, like I was saying, I'm not into really in politics,
but the banning algorithm, it's, I don't know if they figure it out themselves yet,
but it's really...
It's really complex.
And, you know, that's been the excuse, right?
I mean, it's been the excuse that it's really complex.
And I know, by the way, a bunch of people that I know that work on software on the back end are just like, hey, this is a lot more complex.
But I understand that.
But at the same time, it is not so complex.
If there is something occurring with this, they could let us know.
unless someone here is trying to claim that even Twitter doesn't know who's shadow band,
which is a crazy comment.
If one of you guys are, oh, of course, Joe is willing to say that.
Go ahead, Joe.
Are you willing to say that even Twitter does not know who shadow banned?
No, I'm not saying that, but you have to look at.
Another question.
And do you think it's acceptable that I need to go to a third party side just to find out if I'm shadow band?
Do you?
So, I think what's happening is the same thing that if you look at what happened to Fox with Tucker, right?
Tucker peaked in terms of revenue in 2017.
He started to go down in revenue and to a point where in the past years, he's actually drugged down the advertisers on the entire network, right?
Right.
Twitter is a pretty hateful place, right?
Like, you get a lot of hate, you get a lot of trolls.
Not really. Where's the evidence for this, Joe?
Suleiman. It's more so than other places.
I mean, there's child porn and child on Instagram.
Like, look, the reports have come out, like, how bad Instagram?
I'm not talking about that.
I'm just simply talking about trolls and things like that.
Literally pedophilia, like actual pedophilia on other websites.
If you're talking about it is a platform where people disagree a lot, I agree with you.
If it's a platform where people argue a lot, I agree with you.
But to say that doesn't say that-
I'm talking about perception, Donish.
If I was to ask you which social media platform had the most trolls, where would you say?
What's instinctually?
Which one would you pick?
No, but what do you mean by trolls?
Probably Facebook, but yeah, go ahead.
Okay, fine.
I could be completely wrong.
I could be wrong on that.
I would pick LinkedIn.
If you were talking about trolls, I would pick LinkedIn because everybody wants to join my network on LinkedIn.
But go ahead, Joe.
Okay.
Okay. Look, I could be wrong about what people see there, but if they were to unblock everything and just let everything free flow, you could actually create a negative for Twitter for talking to advertisers at all.
The same way when Fox went very, started going more far right, advertisers didn't want to advertise on the network at all.
Didn't even matter who it was next to.
So even if you want to advertise next to someone who's very center, you're not going to want to because you don't want your brand associated with Twitter.
So even if it is easy, even though they've had 10 months to look at the code and review everything, and maybe it's not as difficult as people say,
they still need to be very careful about how they're going to release things out because it will make a difference to how they generate revenue.
But isn't that the problem though, like for example, sorry, Danish.
Isn't that the problem though because you've essentially got a scenario where you all keep making the same point?
advertisers rule.
And so that was the issue
that happened before.
And let me be clear
about the shadow banning.
Yeah, my account, shadow ban.
For example,
there's another account on here,
Calisi,
and someone's posted a comment
about Doc's account as well.
Apparently,
if you even click on those accounts,
specifically Halisi for Deffina,
Doc's ones on in the comments,
it actually says this account,
is sensitive or has sensitive content content.
So you can't even click on the account without basically going through the specific buttons and saying,
look, I'm willing to read it.
And that's only after luckily finding it because it's shadow band.
Like that's the level of basically blocks that are occurring to even see these people.
So...
They let's be clear, that's going to impact their post.
I think it's going to impact it on a compound level.
It's going to impact the engagement on a compound level.
It's going to impact their increase and follow accounts on a compound level.
Like all these are major factors that impact.
I want to take that a little bit further.
Sorry, Sarah.
One second and I'll let you go right after.
One thing that has happened.
Can anyone here tell me why they hired Linda?
Why was Linda hired?
They want more advertising revenue.
Advertising.
There we go.
Oh my God.
It's as if it's as if it's all connected.
Linda was literally hired for advertising revenue.
It does not take, we have very smart people here.
We have very smart people in the audience.
Everybody knows that that's why she was hired.
And now suddenly, hold on, because suddenly we're starting to act like the old
Twitter that generated more advertising revenue.
Oh my God.
Why are we so surprised?
I'm going to let Sarah go first.
I think that needs to tweak, though, Dona, of what you said.
She wasn't hired to get more advertisers.
She's known for innovating the media framework, right?
So she was hired to change the way they, yeah, she was hired to change the way they monetize.
Joe, I told Sarah she goes next.
So she goes next.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Thank you, Dr. Donish.
But Joa, just to speak to your point really quickly,
She was hired, we think, for her, because of her advertising skills and her connections in the, connections in the advertising world.
I think that you're trying to...
I don't want to say make excuses, but aren't we all making excuses?
We're talking about something that is affecting people and affecting their accounts.
And it's quite serious, especially to people that are not having any reach.
Why would anybody join a platform if they are tweeting to six people?
Why would you build a following if you cannot utilize that following at all?
Twitter needs its, Twitter needs its users in order for those advertisers to even make money.
We are the product that they are trying to sell.
I guess I don't understand the pushback here against people that are saying that this feels
like censorship and it feels like a ban, except it's now a soft ban.
It's now done with, well, you're banned, but we're not going to tell.
It's done more covertly.
Right.
You're banned.
We're not going to tell you about it.
And therefore, now it's okay.
And I guess I don't understand the defense of that.
It's not.
It doesn't matter if Twitter is, or why they hired Linda.
What matters is we are the product.
We are what they are selling.
But it does matter why.
Because ultimately,
People were assured that nothing would change.
No, people were assured, Don't know.
But then they lied again.
My big issue, my big issue is that hypocrisy should not be tolerated, whether it comes from the left or the right.
That's the actual problem.
This is total hypocrisy.
Everybody hated on Elon, on old Twitter because of the Twitter files.
And ultimately, we are on our way to the same place.
I'll let somebody else, somebody new jump in.
Chief Trump, just before you go to Chief Trump, because I'm going to go to you.
I mean, Dan, she's going to you.
But guys, in the comments, on the bottom right inside, I would love to hear your opinion.
And we will go through the comments.
Is it the case that we're being too harsh on Elon Musk and you need to give Elon a chance?
Or are we right?
And shadow banning is another form of banning.
And it's just what the only thing that's changed is ideology from Twitter 1.0 and 2.0.
And not much else has changed.
So both points.
Let's hear what you've got to say.
Maybe we're being too harsh.
Chief, go ahead.
Before Chief goes in, I think I want Chief to consider this one point.
is this is different now because people who are banned have actual legal damages
because the contract that's signed and there is a contract that's signed when you sign up for
Twitter blue right you should get what you pay for and if you're not getting what you paid for
then you have damages you start collecting those damages together and people together
and you have class action your damages are you got Twitter blue I can't click on the I
No, let's be real.
Like, I can't, if I click on you, I can't find you.
So after, like, search you now.
So new people can't find you.
Your growth is decreased on a compound level.
And in addition to that, for some people, you click on it,
it says sensitive comment.
And you're like, I don't want to see it's like porn on docksite.
So I can't even click on that.
You know, it's hard to calculate.
I don't go deep in the numbers in terms of what the reach of my tweets are, what they were before, what they are now.
But we're starting to think about the right questions that Twitter and Elon and whoever's redesigning the system needs to consider from a legal aspect.
And that's what I wanted to add to the mix.
And sorry, Chief, for jumping on your mic.
Yeah, so a couple of things.
The issue is when Elon Musk goes on many interviews and talks about free speech absolutist,
Lower left-hand button, Chief?
I'm...
No, I can hear to you, actually.
Doc, we're going to have to send you down and bring it back up.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so when he runs on multiple interviews talking about free speech absolutism,
and then on other interview says that if advertiser wants something gone,
he wouldn't comply, and he's willing to lose money for it.
The cost of free speech...
is money, is business.
That's implied.
If you're going to be a free speech absolutist,
you have to accept the risk
that a company may not want to do business with you.
That's how free speech absolutism works.
And Elon Musk is not a,
random guy from across the street he's a guy with lots of resources lots of money and if he is
going to be a true warrior for free speech absolutism he should be willing to accept that he may not
get all the businesses and so rather than taking that as a negative say these companies here stand for
free speech and are willing to do business with us and stand by free speech that should be a
point not not a point that um
companies run away from, but to be a company that embraces the battle of ideas and not censoring one side or the other side.
And as someone who has been shallow band, I checked a couple of days ago and I was shallow ban for a period of time.
And I was banned on Twitter for pretty much no reason.
I might even show the exact reason for it as I don't swear or curse or anything on my account.
You know, I'm glad that Elon Musk took over and is taking steps to, you know, fix the problem with Twitter and start to bring a small amount of transparency.
But let's be clear, there's a lot of steps to have to be taken.
It's not entirely free speech.
There's still people who are getting banned.
There's still...
you know, shadow ban's going on.
I don't many people in this.
I think the shadow ban problem is way bigger than any of us know.
Because nobody, most people don't know whether they're shadow banned.
That is the actual problem.
And I've got to say for a guy that was supposed to do truth, GPT and reduce bias in AI, how can we trust
that this is suddenly going to be biased,
because we just,
everybody here who has been supporting Elon's point of view
is saying, well, look, it's a business.
Well, Open AI is also a business.
That's why you can't say all those things on Open AI.
How do we know that he's not going to make, you know,
a corporate GPT, just like everybody else?
Chief Trump is that lets you respond to that.
Yeah, so my answer is you couldn't really put full trust in something
when it's brand new.
You need to be, you know, you have to verify what people are dealing.
And, you know,
I would say for Elon, he did take over Twitter recently.
It's not like he's been there for years on end.
So I am patient, and I'm not going to put my trust in him solving this very large issue.
Shalabans are humongously a big issue.
Just think about a consequence for slightly tilting a scale.
to the left or to the right on certain issues is tremendous and it does a lot in elections not to
mention in other issues like totings the scale on uh pharmaceutical products on uh you know on
on a variety on gun issues on some political issue you can go really impact people's opinions on things
if they see the same type of content on twitter
for long periods of time because propaganda and ideas if you see them a lot on twitter or a lot
on a platform for years and years you will start to agree with a bit more you'll start to be more
listening or more open to those ideas.
And if ideas are censor or suppressed for years and years,
you're not going to be able to find those resources
unless you really look for it on Twitter.
So I agree shall bea bands are the biggest issue.
Well, I'm happy they took over
and I'm happy there were some steps taken.
I am not satisfied yet, and I am calling, of course,
for transparency from Twitter and you know to know why I am being shadowed for why is Doc being shallow band why is Kalee why is you know everybody here what why are you all being shallow banned for and uh he wants that he would make some sort of budding or some sort of way to figure out how you're shallow ban or why you are and some appeal process for it but
We haven't seen anything yet.
And I would love to see that.
I'd love to have an answer as to why a child ban.
And I'd love to have a system in place that would reduce the mass child ban.
If we, for a free speech absoluteist, as Elon claims, that he has to buy those terms.
And he has to be free speech.
And he has to accept that with free speech comes, I've sometimes lost a business.
And that's, if you're going to lose business because you stand by your values and your principles,
That's admirable.
That shows you have a spine.
So I want him to embrace free speech.
I want him to say free speech is okay on Twitter.
If you want to do business here,
and you are accepting free speech,
and you should be welcomed and embraced and promoted.
Not...
I think...
I have to push back a little,
and then I do want to go to Joe and Travis
because they've been waiting also.
But, you know, I have to push back just a little bit
because ultimately, I think it was just messaging.
I think it was just talk.
His actions have not followed through.
He went on Tucker.
He's been on a bunch of different news shows.
He's been a bunch of different podcasts talking about how there's going to be a, you know, that he's going to be a free speech.
Absoluteus.
And he has not lived up to the promise.
Yes, he unbanned some accounts.
Good.
I'm happy about that.
that. Yes, by the way, just so you all know, I'm actually not a free speech, you know,
absolutist. I think that's bullshit. I think it's completely made up. I think people fell for the ruse.
That's actually like, it's not actually real. What is, we all knew that he was going to fail.
By the way, months ago, I was saying, I was saying he's going to fail and he's lying. He's
getting this to get people going. He's riling up with.
the base, he's doing whatever he needs to do,
and ultimately it is not,
I just don't like hypocrisy.
I rather he just be honest about what he's actually doing.
Joe, I'll let you respond to that.
Real quick, I'll only 30 seconds.
I agree with anything you're sad.
I don't think we have much as the agreement.
I just, I'm holding, I am basically saying,
to wait like a couple more months and we'll see what happens.
I'm not putting my trust in him yet.
I'm not, you know, saying, you know, going all in on it or anything like that.
I'm saying to be patient.
I have optimism and I'm not going to, I'm looking at this half a whole thing.
And what I'm saying is if we've learned anything.
Of course.
If we've learned anything over the past three, four years, there are no saviors.
There are no perfect people anymore.
There's no such thing like that.
We got to stop believing in all of these freaking people, specific individuals, and just
start claiming that they're amazing when in reality, the only person that you can rely on is
yourself.
And that's honestly the truth right now.
That's what I am.
It's heartbreaking because it's nice to have heroes to look up to.
People do it with politicians.
People are doing with personalities.
Does anybody here know that Elon actually has the highest favorability rating of any celebrity in America right now?
I can bring those numbers up.
It's because of this.
It's because he is, this is complete hypocrisy.
But go ahead, Joe.
Yeah, look, I think if you hold anyone to an absolutist standard, they're going to fail, right?
He is working on it, and I want to correct the statement that you and made about he brought on Linda for advertisers.
There's a lot more candidates that would have been much better for advertisers.
There's only like six big media buying agencies in the world.
hiring ahead of any of those, they would have had 20% or 18% of all the world's biggest advertisers on the Rolodex and could have helped Twitter out.
That's not why Linda's there.
That's not why she's best at.
She's best at fixing the way things get monetized.
And that's what Twitter wants to do.
That's why it shows me promise that he is trying to work towards it by bringing on someone who's innovative new ways to monetize with advertisers.
Right.
So I do think he's fixing it.
I don't think we will ever be able to hold almost anyone to an absolute standard.
I think he is working in the right direction.
I think it takes longer than what people expect.
Recently heard a saying that I really liked, which is people overestimate what could be done in a year.
They underestimate what could be done in a decade.
Right.
He's working towards it. Give him time.
It's an alternate explanation for her that a lot of people are talking about.
And we should consider that.
And that is she's W.E.F.
Right.
And she's responding to the demands of the woke crowd.
Right? And I see that in what I perceive to be the suppression of my account because of my comments on the trans agenda.
And that's at least a possible explanation that they can't be eliminated and it needs to be considered.
I think that's kind of a ridiculous explanation.
And let me jump in here.
Yeah, I was going to go to you, Travis.
I was going to go to you, actually.
So is Doc Wright?
Is it that the Twitter started to become a bit too war?
Yeah.
It's not just me to be clear.
Come on.
Come on.
You know, Japan is the king of the anti-woan crowd.
You're going to call him woke for hiring one to come on.
That's not what I want to respond to.
I want to talk about a lot of stuff here.
So we've talked about free speech absolutism.
which is almost impossible to do on a big social media platform i think the type of free speech
absolutism that you all are asking for would end up in a platform like forchand and you're going to
have people fleeing advertisers and users just completely fling something like that the other thing
i think we're having an issue with is
We're using the word shadow band as a catch-all for probably what is like 50 different systems at Twitter that could be ranking you and causing your tweets to not be showing up.
I think that's part of why it's so difficult to trace individual tweets to whatever system could be causing them to not.
be showing up. And I think Twitter doesn't really call it shadow banning, as they've testified before.
They call it visibility filtering. And one of the interesting things I did learn from the Twitter
files was there is a do not amplify tag. So I guess that would be, it's not boosting it out
into the 4U tab and amplifying it across the entire platform outside of your followers.
So, you know, another truth that I think is important is that people on the right violate
site rules on social media sites in order of magnitude higher than people on the left.
I think that's just true.
The way these sites are set up,
a lot of the questionable borderline content is going to be right.
Hold on.
Do you have any data to prove this actually, Travis?
Or are you just kind of making this up as we go?
No, this is the,
no, I'd love for you.
What,
everybody?
That's true.
I see it every single day.
Anecdotally,
I don't have any hard data for you.
Yeah,
that is absolutely true.
Absolutely.
And by the way, again, just with the reminder, I'm not even on the right.
That's what you all are talking about.
Look at the number of suspensions and bands.
You all are almost all right wing on here.
You're complaining about bands.
I've never been banned.
That's hilarious.
That's because the terms of service on these platforms are targeting conservative ideas.
Hold on, everybody.
Just want to remind Travis, as I said earlier, I'm actually not right wing at all.
I mean, Travis said you're right wing to you must be, bro.
Like, I'm sorry that it hurts your sensibilities, but you're not, I'm not.
I heard you say you were a little earlier.
I believe that.
But, um, yeah, so just to be clear, what I'm against is hypocrisy.
Hold on, Travis.
Let me finish my sentence.
Okay.
What I was saying is I'm against hypocrisy.
And this is hypocritical.
That was my main point.
Keep going, Travis.
And I will ask for data because we, unlike other places where you can just kind of talk, we do need some level of data to prove what we're saying.
I just gave you some.
Look at the number of suspensions and everything.
It's heavily slanted in one direction as you all are complaining about this entire time.
So the other thing.
The other thing I want to mention is the 4U tab has been completely revamped,
and my 4U tab is almost all right-wing content, Ben Shapiro.
I've seen a few of you all in it, actually, that I've never engaged with before.
So I would say that things are more slanted in a more favorable direction for you all at this point.
The other thing I would say, look at the Twitter rules.
I've read the Twitter rules a few times.
I try not to do borderline content or anything that could even be interpreted as against the rules.
And the other thing is go to GitHub, look at Twitter's recommendation algorithm.
They posted it.
That's one of the cool things that you all I did recently.
If you're not an engineer, it's going to be kind of hard to figure out what's going on there.
But you can see a lot of these systems that could potentially be causing UL to be shadow banned, I suppose.
And that's all I got to say.
All right.
Sounds good. Thanks.
Darth, go ahead.
Yeah, so you guys brought up again
what I mentioned earlier, just to clarify one more
time, it is a semantic problem.
We keep talking about shadow banning.
So for people who came later,
when you go to the shadow ban website
that tests, and one of the examples is
there's reply deb boosting,
or sorry, replies being hidden where you have to go to see more to see your replies.
There's a search suggestion ban, things like that.
That's if your shadow band with respect to those things.
The stuff that we can't see, forget about what Solomon said about having to use a third party to see if you're shadowband.
There's no way to know, unless you're inside Twitter, if you're shadow ban the other way,
where stuff that you're posting has its reach.
manually diminished by their system.
There's no way to even test for that.
So if you look at what I put up, I pin, I just pinned.
I said, this is the post I was talking about.
If you look up top on the JumboTron,
Twitter safety put out this tweet where they said,
no more censorship, and Elon had retweeted it,
no more censorship, no more shadow banning,
checkmark freedom of speech, not reach.
What they're referring to is,
the technical term for shadow banding, like using that website, seeing those items I just listed,
it doesn't mean that they're not going to reduce your reach. In fact, the one that says freedom
of speech, not reach admits right there, that's still going to be doing what you're all talking
about. So even if you're not being shadow banned in the definitive sense using that website to test it,
exactly. Yeah, yeah. So you're just using a different term. And then the other thing,
Travis, just to respond to you, when you say more conservatives violate the rules that the
and somebody said,
you have any data to back that up?
You don't need data to back it up.
It's 100% true.
But that's the point.
These platforms, their terms of service,
are constructed in such a way
that the rules essentially ban ideas
that are common on the conservative side
while allowing any idea on the liberal side.
Like, for instance, how many liberals do you know
that would go and aggressively criticize Black Lives Matter
or go in aggressively criticize transgender ideology?
You don't know any.
That's something only conservatives would do.
And when they add that to the terms of service
and say that you can't do those things,
of course conservatives are going to...
I want to push back a little bit on this
because the other side of it is there are some liberals
and atheists that will criticize religion
and they also get shadow banned,
and they also get kicked off of this platform.
So, you know, I do wanna kind of push back a little bit
just because you don't hear about it.
And this is one of the things that we're trying to fix, right?
I mean, I consider myself to be pretty liberal.
I think Soleimand is much more conservative.
and yet we're up here having a conversation, right?
And so this is why we do this.
This is why these rooms exist, actually.
It's because not enough people are doing this.
And I actually disagree with Travis,
even though he is clearly more liberal like me.
And just guys, first of all, thank you for listening.
And we are going to be wrapping up the show.
So, I mean, Alex, I'd like to hear your last thoughts,
if possible, just to summarize from your perspective,
what you've heard in the discussion and your perspective.
Yeah.
Yeah, so one thing I'll say is that I don't think anyone here is necessarily defending it.
It's just trying to get to the bottom of who is responsible for ongoing censorship and ongoing shadow banning.
I'm not going to say it's not going on because I can see that many people in here are experiencing it.
My question is what's causing it.
Is it individual people?
Is it the algorithm?
Is it like some people have suggested something coming from Elon or Linda directly on topics?
I think it's important to understand what the actual, you know, cause of it is.
And I will say with the whole Elon thing and giving him more time, I think a lot of people underestimate
how hard it was for him on day one to number one enter the company, but then also number two,
trying to rebuild it while trying to understand the systems when he made massive cuts in the first
couple weeks. So those entire teams had to be rebuilt. And then having to have an entire new,
you know, chain of command, which he isn't a fan of in organizations.
and trying to get a sense of responsibility who is responsible for overseeing the team who might be responsible for these shadow bands i think that's how a lot of these things might be falling through the cracks um is the new structure of the organization and then also like i pointed out about the new preem of speech not reach policies that being rolled out slowly rather than completely all at once um
I do think that there are some issues that need to be fixed.
It isn't perfect.
But I will say it's a change from Twitter 1.0 where there is,
there was no willingness to reverse, you know, suspensions or it used to be, it's done.
This is our final word.
This person is suspended for their entire life.
We're not going back on it.
I actively see Twitter employees engaging with individuals saying, thank you for pointing that out.
We're fixing that now.
That never happened in Twitter one point out.
It isn't perfect.
I think they're working on it.
I know people don't want to hear, give them more time, but honestly, I think it's positive to see the individuals.
the interactions between employees and Twitter users.
And I think it's more in good faith,
but they're obviously understaffed.
And, you know, I think they're honestly trying.
But that's just my take.
Alex, just one last question before I give it to one or two more people to wrap up.
Other than getting me or the own shadow band,
what?
What is the one thing, the first.
And Doc.
I'm my boy Doc as well.
And Calisi.
And me.
Yeah.
And Chief.
So other than getting the crew unbanded, what's the first thing that you think that should be implemented or could be implemented based on what we're saying that could help?
So I think they should, and again, this is their long-term goal, is to do away with any implementation of new shadow bands.
So their goal then should be to retroactively go and find the account-level shadow bands that are currently in place and take them off and then stop applying new ones altogether and just...
for the time being, hit the content that is of concern with that individual label and stop altogether with the account level labeling.
I think that's going to be the fix later down the line, but like I said...
in my meeting they said that they couldn't do it all at once that they're doing it for certain
violations because they just don't have the manpower to um to go through and you know because
and this is like a small story one account was labeled accidentally with a label and then um it
it was noticed within the first couple seconds,
so nobody,
you know,
saw it.
But it was because their AI was picking up a certain term,
but it was used,
you know,
in a correct way.
For example,
like,
this isn't the exact example used,
but if you call a transmission,
like a tranny,
something like that might be suppressed on accident,
just because of the AI that they were using.
But it was a case like that,
where it was something that was misconstrued as a slur,
but it actually was being used.
used in a correct way. That's why they can't switch it on all at once is because too many
accounts would be impacted and it would just cause it a disaster for their human reviewers.
So that's what they told me. But, you know, long term, I think that's going to be the solution.
Dr. Danish, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
You know, I think what's been interesting has been that overall, people are still
giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, which has been very interesting to me because I feel like
it's really hard to let go of people's priors. People are unwilling to let go of what they
believe he was going to be. And I can tell you that I was kind of excited. I was excited about the
fact that there would be more technological advances. I think there have been.
I'm excited about some of the things that they're doing.
I actually think that Linda is a great hire because they do need to move towards video, which will be easier to monetize.
I do have this exciting belief that this is about to be the platform, which is why when people are like, well, the daily active users are going down, I'm like, that makes no sense.
There's actually no proof.
Yes, revenue is going down, but we don't know if daily active users are going down.
And so this is an exciting time for Twitter, but this is actually exactly when we should be criticizing it.
It's actually right now is the most important time to criticize it because if we don't criticize it, it's going to become exactly what it was built to fight.
Right.
And I think that's what's really interesting right now
is that when we're even seeing tendencies around that.
If you guys realize that on this space,
someone's up here saying,
well, you know, you guys are all on the right
and this is all happening to people on the right.
And I'm standing, I'm sitting here saying, hold on what?
No, no, no, no.
This is about free speech.
And at the end of the day, we legitimately just have to have this really existential conversation around.
Is this free speech, you know, freedom of speech is not freedom of reach?
All of that sounds like a red herring.
I feel like we just need to make a decision.
Is this going to be a platform where there will be lawful speech or is this a platform that won't have that?
And I think it's a really tough decision because, you know, as John Stewart said,
you know, the advertising revenue model is arson.
And the model of these media companies is arson.
They want it to burn because it gets the eyeballs.
Everybody stops.
Whenever there's a car accident and you're driving on the highway,
you stop to look.
There's a reason.
That's what they want Twitter to become.
And so for us to try to say that that's not what's going to happen,
I'm just hoping that's not where we end up.
Joe, our final thoughts?
I think you guys said it all.
I don't really have anything to add.
But I think Donish brings up a really good point.
It's time to criticize so they can make it better.
Right, guys.
Thank you so much for listening and we will see you same time tomorrow.
Thanks, Slay.
Thank you.
Thanks, brother.
Have a good one.
Good night.
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