It's Time for Conservatives to Abandon Twitter [Warden]

Four months ago, James O'Keefe caught multiple Twitter employees on undercover video discussing how algorithms are used to "shadowban" their conservative users.

What's a shadowban? It's basically stealth censorship that throttles or hides a user or his content from some or all of Twitters users. There are no warnings. Everything looks the same to the user, except he's largely tweeting into a void.

Twitter, of course, denied that the employees were speaking for the company or that Twitter uses shadowbans.

This week's announcement that Twitter will be using algorithms that analyze user behavior to downgrade or hide tweets from particular accounts appears to contradict this assertion.

From Buzzfeed:

Twitter will now use thousands of behavioral signals when filtering search, replies, and algorithmic recommendations. If it believes you are trying to game its system, or simply acting like a jerk, it will push your tweets lower down.

Ahhh. Acting like a jerk. Well, I'm sure that this subjective evaluation won't be used to punish any particular ideological group.

Among the signals Twitter will use: whether you tweet at large numbers of accounts you don't follow, how often you're blocked by people you interact with, whether you created many accounts from a single IP address, and whether your account is closely related to others that have violated its terms of service.

Translation: If a bunch of crybaby leftists block you or even the people with whom you associate, you're going to be silenced.

If you don't believe me, well it's already happening. Twitter users can hit this site to see if they've been shadowbanned. I have and so have most of the people that I know on Twitter.

I've suspected for months that Twitter has been monkeying around with my content just based on how my interactions and retweets have dropped from where they were in the past.

With this latest news, I've decided to close my Twitter account and abandon the platform entirely to migrate to Gab.ai, a site similar to Twitter that was founded by a libertarian who is a fierce free speech advocate.

Not only do I think this was the right move for me, I think it's the right move for all conservatives. With this latest change by Twitter, it's become clear that their far-left CEO, Jack Dorsey, is not going to allow voices from the right to be heard on Twitter. He's not even bothering to hide it any longer.

Conservatives who choose to stay on Twitter--to engage and "fight" the left in the marketplace of ideas will have their content throttled and their influence diminished even as Twitter benefits from their use of the site.

Worse, users on the right are putting their private information in the hands of a company entirely populated by unscrupulous, vengeful leftists who think nothing of doxxing people with whom they disagree.

I can't emphasize this enough, these people hate you and cannot be trusted. Ace just posted today about how someone at a website run by Harvard leftists doxxed a commenter simply for making a comment that he didn't like.

The same can easily happen to you. It doesn't matter if you're anonymous on Twitter; unless you've been extremely careful, they've still got your IP address as well as any DMs you've sent friends. Are you certain you never left any identifying information in any of those messages? You'd better be because they save them all and their employees have access to them.

So not only are they actively thwarting your attempts to counter the leftist social media hegemony, they can also potentially unmask anonymous users who are effective in ways that they don't like.

Or, who knows, maybe they give your private information to someone in government who can make life hard for you--someone like a Louis Lerner, perhaps.

No, there's no winning in the social media game when leftist censors control the platform. Conservatives have just two options--agitate for the Facebooks and Twitters of the world to be regulated like utilities or build and support their own platforms. Neither of these are mutually exclusive, but we only have direct control over the latter.

Fortunately, that platform exists for us with Gab.ai. With a user base of around 500,000, it's on the verge of becoming a real player, but it needs content from fun, smart and entertaining users to draw even more conservatives to the platform.

So if you're not there yet, give it a try. Bring a friend. Let's stop supporting our enemies. Let's stop putting money in their pockets by boosting their subscriber counts. Let's stop entrusting our private information to a bunch of sociopaths who wouldn't think twice about ruining your life or anyone else's for the simple crime of expressing a different point of view.

Conservatives have suffered too long from a lack of imagination and a lack of confidence. We don't NEED Twitter. It's an easy, low cost switch to Gab.ai. What have you got to lose? Some followers? Who cares? Your content is being memory holed anyway. Hardly anyone is seeing it.

I understand why conservatives want to stay. We were winning it all for awhile. Every time a big-mouthed lefty celeb posted some inanity meant to garner attaboys from the amen chorus, he got wrecked over and over in his mentions.

It was a bonfire of the vanities for the Establishment, both for the left and the #NeverTrump pretenders on the "right." It was an exciting, heady time when, for the first time in our lives, there was no layer of protection for these bloviating clowns and their cheap sophistry

But that's over. Twitter is desperate to protect the order of things. They can't afford to let you have your say and they aren't going to. Accept this and start supporting friendly alternatives. Remember, every hit you give Twitter is one that conservative sites like Ace of Spades or free speech friendly platforms like Gab.ai aren't getting.

It's time to change direction. Enough is enough. Let's stop acting like a bunch of battered spouses and exercise our options. Support our friends. Punish our enemies. It's time to build our own world.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:05 PM

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