A senior Twitter engineer told me in private this is actually true in a lot of cases. Shadowbanning is often just a temporary infrastructure issue. Twitter is massively reliant on distributed indexes which can fail and require rebuilding. Not sure I'm using the right words. https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/997652913530040320 …
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A very important cognitive bias in humans that served us well in 99% of our history was assuming in simple, purposeful explanation for results. That has broken down in a specialized society relying on complex systems. We assume all failure modes in other industries are simple.
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In this case, we assume a Twitter infrastructure failure is a purposeful, vengeful act because we both (1) Do not understand how a complex system can fail (2) Do not like believing in bad things happening to us for random reasons nobody is purposely at fault for
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Additionally, when shadowbanning does happen, it's, as of the last time I read about it, an automated spam response triggered by an algorithm. Spam systems are notoriously obscure magic. Twitter staff saying THEY don't shadowban people can strictly correct in the right context.
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Remember when Wikileaks made a bunch of hoopla about Facebook blocking their links? You really think a human did that? No, I talked to an engineer there, it was an automated security threat system. Side note, Wikileaks actually hosts malicious emails in some of their dumps.
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We are all pattern-matching creatures who assume the worst living in a world that iterates at a pace that makes it physically impossible for any one person to understand more than a small percentage of it. Welcome to how 2018 happened.
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2018 is just an overflow error from 2017
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