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'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't approved by those in control of the network. Their ideas get boosted, their opposition doesn't, therefore they can control the Narrative. Same tactic with "Trends for 'you'".

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

An interesting side-effect of this suppression-through-association that I haven'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.