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Socially- or Corporate- or Centrally-Controlled Surveillance, Censorship and Throttling is Not Media

Video download link | md5sum ea7d35a3c92713cba617790959ad7af7



Summary: The 'social control media' situation is getting out of hand; in YouTube, for example, there's a broad revolt against strict editorial control by Google and in Twitter it seems like ordinary users aren't shown so much to people who actually "follow" them

AS we noted earlier this month, Twitter seems to be 'hiding' ordinary accounts, maybe in favour of "bigger" and "high-profile" accounts like celebrities and infamous demagogues, in effect transforming the platform into mainstream media without non-conformist views (for better "engagement", even if that means more misinformation and suppression of free speech).



"I know for sure that it's definitely not the same as before as I see the same in other accounts, starting at almost the exact same time."I admit upfront that I do not understand the nature of the change and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Users need to communicate with one another and may have to work 'in reverse' or sort of reverse-engineer what they're doing in Twitter, the company; they're not transparent and definitely not upfront about it, so we need to assess the outcome and try to figure out what algorithms are used to arrive at it. I know for sure that it's definitely not the same as before as I see the same in other accounts, starting at almost the exact same time. Google did the same in YouTube months ago, hence we compared YouTube's changes to Twitter's.

The video above shows some related evidence, based on my personal account, which I stopped using last year (it's just passively reposting what I publish elsewhere). In order to better understand what's going on we kindly ask readers to check if they were similarly affected about 3 weeks ago. The patterns observed can help draw some conclusions, or at least form a better understanding. We want the hard facts. As we noted last year (in relation to Twitter becoming strictly JavaScript-only), there's almost no press coverage at all about what goes on at Twitter on a technical level. Astoundingly enough, nobody deems it worthy of reporting.

"The patterns observed can help draw some conclusions, or at least form a better understanding."Either way, social control media if not the World Wide Web as a whole is a monopoly over information; sure, anyone can in theory participate, but not everyone gets the same visibility (some get actively blocked, shadowbanned, deplatformed and so on).

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