Tech

Elon Musk will reveal if your Twitter account is censored by the social network

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is currently working on a software update that will give you access to a tool to clearly indicate if you have been shadowbanned.

Twitter Elon Musk
Credit: manovankohr / 123RF

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has announced several upcoming changes to his social network. First, the company will soon clarify its old censorship policy. With an upcoming update, users will be notified if their account has been shadowbanned. This means that the profile is hard to find or the posts are invisible to other Twitter users, even his followers.

The social media company reportedly in the past marked some accounts with “ trending blacklist », « search blacklist », « do not amplify and other options to prevent their tweets from reaching a wider audience. The update would also provide instructions for appealing the decision, according to Elon Musk.

Elon Musk wants more transparency on Twitter practices

The announcement comes amid a new release of internal Twitter documents, which shed light on the practice of limiting the reach of certain potentially harmful content. Some former employees of Twitter, who were fired just after the takeover of the billionaire’s social network, would have voluntarily censored certain publications of various political personalities.

Under this policy, Twitter intentionally blocked searches for certain individual users, or made a specific tweet less easy to find. The company also reportedly blocked certain posts from the “trending” page and removed them from hashtag searches.

Twitter is not alone in wanting to be more transparent about this practice. Instagram just launched a similar feature with its latest update, letting you know if you’re currently blocked from recommendations. For now, it can only show if you’ve been blocked from viewing recommendations in Explore, Feed, and Reels, but Instagram is working on expanding the tool so you can see if you’re also blocked from viewing in “suggested accounts”.

So it remains to be seen when Elon Musk will roll out the new update. In the meantime, the billionaire is expected to delete 1.5 billion Twitter accounts deemed inactive for release certain usernames that were previously unusable by active Internet users.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *