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Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
- stivatron 1y agoThey have to follow the law of the country as tyrannical as it is like they did in Brazil. I hope one day they say fuck it.
- warkdarrior 1y agoTurkey has a law requiring social networks to shadowban opposition-party candidates?
- fourseventy 1y agothis answers your question: https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081 https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081
- notenlish 1y agoNot officially but they definitely requested twitter to shadowban the opposition candidate
- utku1337 1y agoshadow ban is not part of that
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIt is when you get a letter from the government telling you to do that on whatever pretext which doesn't matter at that point because you either comply with the government requests, or have to leave the country otherwise they risk banning, fines or imprisonment/asset seizing. Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it. The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.
- FredPret 1y agoBut then X just gets banned in said country
- ronsor 1y agoThis is acceptable.
- FredPret 1y agoNow that country goes from having limited access to having none at all - seems worse. If you don't like X (understandable) then it's much better to not visit it voluntarily than by a top-down block
- pegasus 1y agoIt's worse because it hands repressive authorities a much more powerful tool of mind control than what they had before. More powerful because targeted, hard to detect and even harder to prove.
- ahartmetz 1y agoFor the world and Turkey, yes, for X, no.
- NewJazz 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Arab_Spring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_A...
- foxglacier 1y agoWhat other moral standard is there besides laws? Is it that the laws of non-tyrannical countries should override those of tyrannical ones? How do you decide tyrannicalness? Or should internet companies decide what should be allowed in other countries despite those countries and their populations disagreeing? Great firewalls are the solution when nobody can agree with each other across borders but that's a pity.
- ronsor 1y ago> What other moral standard is there besides laws? To be honest, you could restrict your compliance to only the laws of the country you're based in. American companies follow American laws, etc. Then move your company to where you most agree with the laws.
- tracker1 1y agoAnd when your company has an office in that country, or prominent employees have family in that country?
- ronsor 1y agoPerhaps do not have an office in that country. As for employees, that is their concern. Ideally the country is not willing to punish the family members of employees of companies that do not follow its draconian laws, but we know some do, such as China. Regardless, that is not a reason to capitulate; if you do so, you are effectively enabling state-backed extortion.
- tshaddox 1y ago> Or should internet companies decide what should be allowed in other countries despite those countries and their populations disagreeing? Internet companies (like all companies) can and indeed must choose how they behave. "We follow all laws inside each country" is one such choice, but it's not a special privileged choice that absolves the company of criticism for its behavior.
- chuckadams 1y ago
- nashashmi 1y agoElon has bragged about shadow banning posts in the interview with don lemon. Apparently twitter has been the most important public town square… to manipulate. Thank you.
- dmix 1y agoWhich interestingly was almost exclusively far right accounts. He shadow banned 3-4 and kicked a few others off X premium (so they don't get paid for tweets). Which X claimed was for spamming him and others after they disagreed with him over supporting H1B visas. But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos? None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business. "If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed."
- KerrAvon 1y agoTed Turner sold off CNN decades ago. I think it's now owned by whatever became of Time Warner, which is now in the hands of right-wing billionaires with ideologies similar to Bezos and Murdoch.
- lovich 1y agoI know it was a rhetorical question but Phil Knight and his son with Laika studios are the only example of rich guys in media who are actually doing it for the love of the game
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
- kutaybalta 1y ago[flagged]
- roughly 1y agoI am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years). Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.
- NewJazz 1y agoCan you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...
- ayhanfuat 1y agoIt was indeed more selective before Elon https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
- dmix 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter
- bmelton 1y agoAm I reading it correctly that there are no instances on that wikipedia after Elon's purchase (other than the Substack incident?)
- kodcuherif07 1y ago[flagged]
- fourseventy 1y agoX's stated goal is to comply with the laws of any given country that it operates in. As the article states, there is a court order to restrict that particular users account https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081 https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1920426409358455081. This is a nothing burger.
- utku1337 1y agoI suggest you read the article. Officially restricting an account is one thing, but shadow banning without a court order is another. Something suspicious is happening, and the article talks about it.
- pegasus 1y agoIn my understanding of the article it says they did get a court order: "Elon Musk didn’t say anything about the situation and X didn’t defend freedom of speech. They only said there was a court order and they couldn’t do anything. But many people believe they should have defended free speech."
- mnw21cam 1y agoMy reading of the article is that they had a court order telling them to close down the original account, but they seem to be shadow-banning the new account without one.
- pegasus 1y agoOn a second reading, your interpretation might be the right one, it's not super-clear.
- pessimizer 1y agoMine too. But that sounds to me like they're protecting the new account by limiting its reach, not being helpful to the Turkish government. People who seek it out will still see it, but it may pass unseen for a little while from Erdogan who could get a new court order to shut it down with a 30-second phone call. Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.
- theneki 1y agoThey won elections for years with a puppet candidate. Now there is no puppet candidate, and they want to block this one by using all the power of the state.
- StefanBatory 1y agoAre you saying that opposition had a puppet candidate all this time in Turkey, like you'd see in Russian elections?
- theneki 1y agoYes, that’s exactly what I mean.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- timzaman 1y agoHard to believe given the tweets have 100ks of views.
- NewJazz 1y agoOn an earth of 8 billion? And how many views are in Turkey?
- ebrugulec123 1y agoEven if X is acting under a court order in Turkey, the shadow-ban–like behavior on a global platform is concerning. Hiding posts algorithmically goes beyond legal compliance and raises serious questions about whether X is protecting free speech or quietly facilitating censorship.
- internetter 1y agoAI comment?
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoIt does feel AI, but Ebru Guleç is also a _very_ Turkish name. It could be somebody who doesn’t have the best English is using ai to put together a coherent sentence. Regardless of the origin, I’d prefer if the comment make an actual claim, instead of just talking about “questions raised”. I wish they’d try to answer the question they detect lol
- terminalbraid 1y agoLong dashes in "shadow-ban–like" is a telltale sign
- dragonwriter 1y agoThere is no em-dash in the comment; there is an en-dash used in place of a hyphen where one of the terms joined is itself a hyphenated term. Edit: Note the parent has since been edited and previously said the tell was an “em-dash”, but now says “long dashes” in reference to a single correct use of the shortest—except in fonts with narrow digits, where the figure dash might be shorter—dash.
- sercansolmaz 1y agoThe Turkish government definitely has a hand in this situation. Otherwise, I think the fact that I see almost no posts from an account that has notifications enabled and that I follow indicates a flawed algorithm. I congratulate the friend who shared this post. He touched on a very nice, detailed topic...
- numpad0 1y agoPossibly but also plausible that they just do it anyway. The post-acquisition Twitter "shadowban" a lot of contents and users in-organically and algorithmically in their attempt to change its content-novelty-meritocracy culture into cash based influence economy, with not significant, but not at all negligible, successes.
- socrates1998 1y ago[flagged]
- declan_roberts 1y agoHow do you measure viable? Twitter is still the best place to hear and read about breaking news.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago[flagged]
- kelseyfrog 1y agoMorally viable. One that conforms to personal and social norms and values. For example, if one values free speech or resistance against reactionaries, then a platform which censors and promotes reactionaries would not be morally viable. Many people, think they hold a different set of values than they do. When push comes to shove, following rules, stability, and security trump liberty, freedom, and equality. In reality some folks are much easier than even that - a quick bite of hot news releases a squirt of dopamine more enticing than all of these and it's much easier to justify that it didn't really compromise their moral behavior.
- rideontime 1y agoIf you don't mind getting completely fake news. Community Notes used to be good at addressing this, but Elon publicly gimped it recently to kowtow to the right-wing crowd upset about losing their monetization.
- catapart 1y agocitation needed on that "best" designation. It's certainly A place to hear about breaking news. Maybe the best place to hear about elon or tesla news fast. but anything else? Been keeping up with the gamedev industry just fine on my twitter-less socials.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 8200_unit 1y ago[flagged]
- aa_is_op 1y ago[flagged]
- flykespice 1y agoMr freedom of speech strikes again! I like how Elon is so eager to bend his knee to censor requests from authoritarian "friend" governments like India and Turkey but when the request comes from a supposedly "left-leaning" judiciary like Brazil to suspend accounts that were posting misinformation, suddenly he stands on his principles and defy the orders.
- jjangkke 1y ago[flagged]
- selim17 1y agoElon Musk loves to brand himself as a “free speech absolutist” but when it comes to authoritarian regimes like Turkey, that principle evaporates instantly. Pre-Musk Twitter, for all its flaws, at least pushed back against censorship requests - now, X bends the knee without hesitation. Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit. Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.
- trelane 1y ago> Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient. Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape. "Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago> We don't have solid proof but These shadowban stories are so often just hearsay and anecdotes from random users just feeding weird conspiracy vibes. Never go on a user saying they don't see something, there's too many variables in the mix from their usage patterns to sure, actual weird Elon/X algorithm tweaks at play.
- BlueTemplar 1y agoThat Xitter uses a complex, opaque algorithm, is why it should be banned in the first place.
- leetharris 1y agoMisleading title. There is no proof at all, just speculation in this post. From the last paragraph: "We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds."
- DustinBrett 1y agoProof has never stopped these people from making claims.
- notenlish 1y agoThere is proof, people have had their likes and retweets removed from the presidential candidates x account on multiple cases. Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get. Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?
- lysace 1y agoThe problem here is primarily Erdogan and secondarily Musk.
- raziel2p 1y agoThe world might have people like Erdogan hold less powerful positions if large social platforms like Twitter didn't enable populism and suppression so easily.
- lysace 1y agoOkay, half a point. However, Twitter wasn't instrumental in getting Erdogan elected in 2003. TV/Radio has been his thing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-20-tv-and-radio-stations-post-coup-clampdown https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-...
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoDon’t agree with this. People really want to elect these politicians and they significantly represent the culture. There can be an element of force to how they win but it is not the whole picture. Have to accept that there are a lot of people with reasons to support these politicians
- mensetmanusman 1y agoPoverty and lack of education empower folks like Erdogan.
- ysofunny 1y agoI think shadow banning is harmful. But I have been ostracized all my life so I am definitely biased
- kiitos 1y agoyou will meet assholes in your life, but if everyone you meet is an asshole, you're the asshole think on this
- balder1991 1y agoOr you’re just different in a society that doesn’t tolerate differences.
- xp84 1y agoI continue to be skeptical of hanging hopes for 'free speech' on expecting free-as-in-beer, ad-supported, privately owned websites to actively promote the things that you write. Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor by letting him post on their site in the first place, and in an algorithmic timeline it is impossible to justify how much reach his posts "should" have vs. how much they do have. If someone wants to post their speech, they should do so on their own website that they pay for and control. They should purchase advertising if they're not satisfied with their traffic. Thwarting those things -- now that's unethical government censorship, which one can justifiably be mad about. Depending on the government in question it may or may not be unconstitutional. Relying on X or Meta or whomever to distribute your speech just because there's some vague notion of non-interference in speech on such platforms in the countries where they're based is foolish when you live somewhere else with different laws. Even if the US constitution had some draconian provision to force X to promote his speech, that can't really protect him in Turkiye where the government can just block X.
- raziel2p 1y agoHow is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.
- xp84 1y ago- Purchasing advertising can be done from a variety of actors not just a couple social media platforms. - As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice. Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.
- hereme888 1y ago[flagged]
- reboot81 1y agoThat’s it. Im going to get my family to delete their x accounts.
- halukakin 1y agoConsidering Turkey is an EU membership candidate. This should fall under the guidelines of Digital Services Act. This is a clear violation.
- SilverElfin 1y agoIs it? X just follows the country’s applicable laws right? Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.
- xxray 1y agoIt’s been long time since Twitter invited to settle in Turkey.. so guessing they getting on well on something obvious lol
- Argonaut998 1y agoNot the first time this has happened. It’s very strange. Elon is willing to risk breaking the laws of the EU, Brazil and the UK yet caters to Turkish law with seemingly no resistance whatsoever.
- balder1991 1y agoHe knows authoritarian countries will order what they want and that’s it, so he simply comply. But for democracies where power is more diffuse, he can afford to make a show and try to shift public opinion to whatever he wants, defying the State as much as possible.
- hashstring 1y agoEarlier this year: https://xcancel.com/netblocks/status/1902230361968427206 https://xcancel.com/netblocks/status/1902230361968427206
- cheschire 1y agoI wondered early on if this X brand was going to take off. If maybe this was a genius move that I just didn't comprehend. And yet here we are, over 3 years later, still needing to caveat X with Twitter in common usage.
- yalogin 1y agoWe all know is vehemently aligned on right wing ideology. So this is not surprising. What in surprised by though is why it’s relevant.
- notenlish 1y agoNothing shocking, Musk doesn't stand for free speech, neither does Erdogan.
- afroboy 1y agoActually no president does.
- Rakshith 1y agoAs they should, the islamic brotherhood are terrorists or soft terrorists funding terrorists. Twitter used o bloack terrorists but then started letting them on to propagate propaganda and literally use the platform to mobilize their troops all over the world, the islamic invasion, as the world sees it today. It has been in the works for decades while we got busy with our own 1st world issues like feminism and homosexuality. Those people will kill these fanatics but uses them to weaken their target.