A new #Shadowban-Tester for Twitter can be found on shadowban.eu. It also checks for Quality-Filter-Discrimination #QFD, which hides your posts in searches.
What Twitter says vs. what science says.
Check out the paper called "Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning", which is a reference to Twitter's blog post.
arxiv.org/abs/2012.05101
Are you or your contacts shadow banned? Check it out at whosban.eu.org and at the same time help academic researchers working on collecting information on shadow banning.
Purple nodes in the graph are subject to at least one type of ban.
The change of the retweet function is an attempt of US election interference. Twitter has tested this feature before. There needs to be an investigation on Twitter's internal insights on how this feature affects the reach of political content.
We are currently seeing a lot of tests causing our server to exceed the Twitter rate limits. For this reason, tests may currently fail and you will see a server failure message.
We are trying to work around these limits but it is unclear whether our attempts will be successful.
How does Quality Filter Discrimination (#QFD) look like:
Tweets do not show up in searches. You have to disable the quality filter to find them. The quality filter is activated for searches on default. #Shadowban
A scientific paper about Twitter's shadow banning practice is going to be presented on one of the top computer science conferences. We are cited in the Acknowledgements section.
It's very good to finally see some scientific research on shadow banning.
In some cases, the reply deboosting test will output "Something unexpected went wrong". This is the result of a recent Twitter change (The Twitter Web API is returning less tweets than requested.) and it means that we were unable to perform the test.
We are working on a fix.
Dorsey's definition of shadowbanning is different to yours. According to Twitter, shadowbanning means to make content completely undiscoverable to others. Notably, only "limiting distribution or visibility of any Content on the service" is not covered by this definition.
How does Quality Filter Discrimination (#QFD) look like:
Tweets do not show up in searches. You have to disable the quality filter to find them. The quality filter is activated for searches on default. #Shadowban
Screenshots from the #TwitterHacked incident showing a moderation panel have surfaced. One screenshot shows a "Trends Blacklist" button, which is a feature we could so far only suspect to exist. It appears to prevent users from influencing the trends.
The authors of the paper have also developed an own tester which is available at whosban.eu.org. It supports the detection of one more ban type (inverse ghost ban) and also checks neighboring nodes. We highly recommend you to check it out.