"While the filters have been around since August 2016 and were supercharged in May, Twitter's aggressive censorship of conservative accounts was noticed Thursday afternoon by the Daily Wire's Ryan Saavedra, after he said he saw reduced activity following a viral tweet with 3.85 million views in which Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (CA) calls for attacks on members of the Trump administration. In short order, a flood of influential conservative Twitter users discovered they were shadowbanned also using an account checking tool at shadowban.eu."
Turns out I was right.......
....
I have a hypothesis about Twitter's Quality Filter or what they call QFD.
I think most of us have noticed our analytics showing drastic declines in overall engagement....Tweet counts, retweet numbers, follower numbers declining and generally not allowed to go above a certain number. All of the social media companies are talking about improving their sites by properly dealing with hate speech, fake news, and so called trolls. Most of them have enacted new algorithms this year and strangely enough most conservatives, especially the big fish accounts like Infowars and Donald Trump, have seen their engagement numbers plummet. As we speak these companies are being grilled by Congress on what appears to us as stealth censorship but of course they are all denying it and blaming it on the algorithms.
They aren't lying, the blame is mostly with the algorithms....created by their mostly liberal humans.
Now on to my hypothesis.
I believe Twitter is slowing down the engagement levels of most conservative accounts by using their quality filter to shadow ban many moderate to somewhat influential accounts while leaving the big fish accounts like Infowars alone. By interfering with the smaller accounts outreach levels they effectively stifle the reach of the bigger fish accounts which in turn stifles the conservative message on twitter.
Twitter's new "quality filter" started in March. People started noticing their numbers falling shortly after. Well, conservatives that is. Twitter’s support page explains that the Quality Filter “filters low-quality content from your notifications”. Who gets to decide what is or isn't low quality? Well twitter humans do who in turn rig the algorithms. Low quality = unapproved groupthink.
I found this gentleman on Twitter who created an open source test to see if quality filter is effecting you. I entered my name and found that it is definitely effecting me. I decided to check some of my favorite accounts like Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Ali, and Paul Joseph Watson. None of them show this filter affecting them.
Paul Joseph Watson of @Infowars has over 800,000 followers and I know his numbers for Youtube views has experienced drastic declines. Whenever Paul releases a new video it becomes his pinned tweet. Twitter used to be a great generator of traffic for your videos or blog posts. What happens when PJW does what he always does? If you go straight to his timeline you will see he pinned tweet and watch his video. But, if you were not a follower and might have happened upon his tweet by many of his followers who RT everything he tweets, you aren't going to see it.
Twitter is stifling the conservative message by shadowbanning not the most influential accounts but instead stifling their followers who don't have as big of a platform to bring attention to the problem. I used to routinely get between one million and 2 million tweet impressions every month and my follower count was always rising. My impressions now linger around six hundred thousand and my follower count won't seem to rise above 7770 and if it does it won't stay above that number very long.
People like Mike Cernovich and PJW impressions are in the tens of millions. The reason they are able to reach so many is because of those of us with smaller but very productive accounts that generate more impressions than you're average user. I have been retweeted by Mike and Jack several times and while it does boost my outreach I have noticed their RT's don't create nearly as much traffic as they have in the past.
POTUS 23.6 Million :No QFD
Paul Joseph Watson 880k Followers: No QFD
MikeCernovich 419K Followers: No QFD
Jack Posobiec 345k Followers: No QFD
Ali 55 K Followers: No QFD
Yvonne Burton 7 K Followers: QFD Shadow Banned
Dr. Jane Ruby 16 K Followers: QFD Shadow Banned
Cari Kelemen 27 K Followers: QFD Shadow Banned
Scooter Downey 1 K Followers: QFD Shadow Banned
I posted a few pics of what I found below but what I noticed is every big name I entered was not being effected by the quality filter but when I put in smaller accounts like mine that have several thousand followers we are all being affected by the filter. By silencing us, they are effectively lowering the outreach for the biggest fish accounts. Diabolical isn't it?
You try it. I admit I could be all wrong...it's just a hypothesis.