Twitter Appears to Be Shadow Banning Accounts That Criticize Elon Musk

On X, formerly Twitter, criticize the site's "free speech absolutist" owner Elon Musk, and you may get secretly punished. The New York Times reports that three users who squabbled with Musk in December — all prominent right-wing accounts — saw their engagement "practically vanish overnight," with their posts suddenly plunging far below the number of views they normally receive, in some cases never to recover. The suspiciously timed drop-offs appear to be examples of shadow banning, the practice of severely suppressing a user's reach without informing them they're being punished. In effect, it allows site admins to ban people without actually banning them, and is difficult to detect. That it's allegedly being leveraged against Musk's critics is striking, and serve as the latest evidence of the billionaire's hypocritical devotion to free speech. "This is working against the type of environment that he claimed he wanted to build," Ari Cohn, the lead counsel for technology policy at the ... Read full article.