Shadow Banning

Published: Sun 29 May 2022
Updated: Tue 22 November 2022
By steve

In Markets.

Sunday 29, May 2022

Shadow Banning

I like Twitter. It works for me. I can easily unfollow (or mute, or turn off re-tweets etc.) to fine tune the stuff I see in my timeline. A lot of very smart people are on Twitter, and I’ve learned a lot from them, not least from things they’ve alerted me to. I follow some accounts which are deliberately provocative. One might even call them ‘clickbait’. But they can be funny, and often satire is the most effective protection we have against government overreach. One such account is Rudy Havenstein. He had a large following on Twitter. His tweets were largely critical of the Fed in general. He weapon was humour, but he got banned and has had to go to Reddit, an altogether less enjoyable site. The link is to his substack. Substack is attracting similar blogs. This is worth a read. I don’t hate the Fed, but I am sceptical that it can do very much to influence the real economy, because of the huge shadow bank sector that it has no control over, especially the Eurodollar system.

Being banned is one thing, but it seems clear that Twitter directs traffic, and encourages followers, to some accounts and not to others. If you don’t switch off that abomination the “Top Tweets” star at the top right of Twitter, you’ll get the tweets that Twitter has decided that would be best for you to see. Stop reading, and make sure it’s set to “see latest tweets instead”. That’s what you want. Believe me.

Another evil thing that Twitter does is to stop certain accounts, and tweets, showing up as search results. Rational Reflections, a blog about investing, has suffered this fate. Read about how he knows, and what it’s like to be shadowbanned here. I am not like Elon Musk. I know that to keep advertisers onside, you have to control content tightly. It’s a difficult job. But if you think that Twitter really is a “town square” where everyone’s voice can be heard equally loudly, you’re very much mistaken.

I don’t have enough followers to suffer this fate. Maybe I’m just too cautious with what I tweet. Feel free to follow me. The link is somewhere on this blog.

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Summers is to economic policy what Kissinger is to foreign policy. Their survival tells you that they are insiders, and will exercise influence whatever the colour of the regime.

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