That Massive Twitter Hack Revealed More Than Just a Bitcoin Scam

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Twitter
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018, in Washington. Lawmakers have sparred over whether a now-reversed change to auto-suggestions on Twitter had unfairly hurt Democrats or Republicans more. Dorsey isn’t saying which, but tells lawmakers he’ll follow up. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
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If you weren’t around last night, you missed one of the funnier happenings on Twitter in its history.

First, accounts like Joe Biden’s and Barack Obama’s were hacked, with messages being sent out asking for people to send them bitcoin payments that they would supposedly double. After that, all the blue-checkmark accounts had their accounts locked for over an hour. This led to hilarious postings such as this.

Pro-tip: If you aren’t following @ComfortablySmug, you are missing out on a lot of quality content. His promotions and narrations of Trump’s pressers are gold.

Regardless, the hack apparently revealed more than just the fact that they are terrible at security. And to be clear, they are really, really terrible at security.

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What was also revealed were images of Twitter’s top-secret admin panel. What was on there? The ability to shadow-ban and trend-ban, both things conservatives have suspected existed for years despite the denials from Twitter itself.

Ever wonder why certain topics that are very hot on Twitter don’t make the trends list or are at the bottom? This is obviously why. Twitter employees have the direct ability to blacklist certain trends. That’s not exactly big news. What is more newsworthy is their ability to search ban, which is simply another way of saying shadow-ban.

Twitter has long denied that they shadow-ban, including writing a blog on it two years ago. They pointedly said they do not shadow-ban, yet what else would you call banning someone from being searchable? Twitter has been lying to everyone this whole time and it’s why they are now desperately deleting pictures that provide the evidence.

In the end, Twitter can do what it wants I suppose, but they should stop gaslighting people about how they run their operation. They absolutely shadow-ban and they absolutely throttle content based on political ideology. I’ve personally been “reply deboosted” many times by Twitter. That’s their more subtle way of making sure no one sees your posts. When it happens, I just quit posting because engagement goes down to almost zero.

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