The microblogging social network has published where denies that at any time its platform has deliberately made the call shadowbanning, that is, the practice that involves making it impossible to find tweets from some user accounts, without the account owners knowing.
Why Twitter was accused of shadowbanning
It all goes back to last Thursday when the Vice News outlet reported that Twitter limited the visibility of accounts of representatives of the Republican Party within searches: indeed, Donald Trump joined the complaint about shadowbanning in the social network.
., several conservative Republican Congressmen, and ‘s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned.
— VICE News (@VICENews)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1022447980408983552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1022447980408983552&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eluniversal.com.mx%2Ftechbitga-que-nie%2Ftwitter shadow-ban
But, the reason for this drop in visibility in search results It was not due to a shadowbanning practice, but to a bug:
People are asking us if we shadow ban. We don’t. Read more to get all the facts.
—Twitter (@Twitter)
“We identified a problem in which some accounts were not automatically suggested in search, even when searched for by their specific name. To be clear, this only affected our search autosuggestions. The accounts, their tweets and the conversations around these accounts appeared in the search results” and safe that the problem has already been solved.
According to platform statements, hundreds of thousands of accounts were affected by this problem, encompassing a wide range of political and geographic ideologies, while in fact most of the affected accounts they have nothing to do with politics at all.
In any case, and to make this matter clearer, the microblogging social network has shared the standard under which the ranking of tweets is carried out and search results on the platform.
How Twitter Ranks Your Results
According to the social network, its classification models take into account many different parameters in order to better organize tweets for users who search for them: this relevance must be both timely and immediate.
These are the factors that Twitter takes into account when ranking its results:
- Those tweets from the people the user is most interested in are classified as highlighted for each of them.
- Tweets that are popularthey are probably interesting and should appear higher in the ranking.
- As for the tweets that come from (those who intend to manipulate or divide the conversation) will be ranked lower.
Twitter assures that this last point is the basis of its current work, in order to drive healthier public conversationsand that to find these “actors in bad faith” is based on the following signs:
- Account Specific Features: with which Twitter can know your authenticity, for example confirmed email accounts, profile picture, etc.
- Actions and behavior of accounts on Twitter: Who is the account following, what content is being retweeted, etc.
- How is the interaction with other accounts: who follows the account, who retweets the content that is forwarded, who mutes or blocks the account, etc.
Thus, Twitter ensures that its focus is to create smarter and better systems every day, whose main objective is to have, in addition to gain the trust of your users.
Image:
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus