“Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach - our enforcement philosophy which means, where appropriate, restricting the reach of Tweets that violate our policies by making the content less discoverable.”
Surprise! Our great ‘X’ CEO has brought back one more bad thing that we hated about twitter 1.0: Shadowbanning. And they’ve given it a new name: “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach”.
Perhaps the new approach by X is an improvement? At least they would “politely” tell you when you’re being shadow banned.
I think freedom of speech implies that people have the autonomy to decide what they want to see, rather than being manipulated by algorithm codes. Now it feels like they’re saying, “you can still have your microphone… We’re just gonna cut the power to it if you say something we don’t like”.
It’s not ouroboros because it’s not artists with 1k followers that are keeping most people on Twitter. They are just the small fishes caught in the turmoil. Rihanna and those at her level can move anywhere, anytime and they won’t even notice the difference. They are likely not even handling their accounts personally.
But I don’t care to kill Twitter more than I care about smaller artists. What is it really being gained if you sacrifice them just for the satisfaction of killing a platform you don’t even use? A lot of artists struggle but that doesn’t make their work any less valid.
I’d hope everyone manages to move over, ultimately it’s their best hope because that place will only get worse, but even I see that not everyone will make it. The followers lost in the move might be the difference that ends the viability of their career. But it’s tragic that this is the situation that they have to deal with. So, why rush them and shame them for it?
The problem is that the artist needs an audience to use arts as a means to survive. If there is no audience to pay or exchange goods for the art provided by the artist, the artist cannot use art as a sole means to survive. Like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Twitter is just another platform providing a specific type of audience.
Unfortunately, the artist doesn’t get to dictate the audience they receive from the platform since they don’t control it. In essence, an artist that starts relying on specific platforms for an audience is making a calculated risk that the audience will remain unchanged for the forseeable future.
As for shadowbanning, even if it is a crappy tactic, in the end is just the platform owner(s) shaping their audience to the way they see fit. One can argue that it is just a tactic to go against the artist. The reality is that the owner(s) are looking at how their audience grows and shrinks and are making their own changes to maximise audience growth and, in the case of twitter, advertisement revenue growth.
When someone relies on a service they provide (art) to pay the bills, pay for food, etc. it’s devastating when your service loses customers/audience. Life is a constant risk prediction. Attempting to force change on circumstance outside of one’s control is high risk of failure and, in my opion, an effort best used in finding better opportunities.