AESTHETIC SUPPRESSION: AN INTERESTING SIDE-EFFECT OF SOFT CENSORSHIP

@humansofflat has apparently left Twitter after being deboosted. I actually had the impression that EVERYONE worth talking to was reply deboosted. I was just excited to have my search suggestion ban lifted.

But what& #39;s interesting about this case is that there was hardly any (zero?) political content on his account; nothing that could have merited suppression, even from the shamelessly biased perspective of the masters of this social network.

The deboosting seems to happen largely through association: your followers are on the wrong side, therefore you are on the wrong side, therefore you are deboosted either without cause or on account of a few harmless trigger words that would otherwise be ignored.

We all know the motivation behind this tactic. The purpose is to limit the spread of ideas that aren& #39;t approved by those in control of the network. Their ideas get boosted, their opposition doesn& #39;t, therefore they can control the Narrative. Same tactic with "Trends for & #39;you& #39;".

I discussed trigger words in this thread after I was first hit with a ban, but they& #39;re not the whole story, since a test has shown that trigger words alone aren& #39;t sufficient to cause the suppression. https://twitter.com/JohnSanilac/status/1231031141089476608">https://twitter.com/JohnSanil...

An interesting side-effect of this suppression-through-association that I haven& #39;t seen anyone discuss is that completely non-political ideas and tastes which happen to be popular among "objectional" groups are suppressed at the same time as the directly political content.