There could be so many reasons for tweets becoming unavailable, not related to The World Hates Scott Adams(tm). It appears to happen when you quote someone, then block them, for example. It could also just be a bug. I've seen the "this tweet is unavailable" message tons of times, but never noticed a pattern.
If it's true that this is throttling, a tool used to suppress and censor "any content that disagrees with [Twitter's] political views" then that would be interesting but there's nothing in this post that supports this except a strange video.
The "great video" makes a lot of claims without any proof. It's mostly a long, super aggressive, homophobic[0], rant.
Could it just be selection bias. If you mostly follow aholes on Twitter, and some tweets become unavailable because the quote feature is broken (or something), then it seems like your ahole opinion is being censored?
[0]: Uses language like "I'm the worlds biggest faggot", "fat bull dykes", etc.
This is exactly what I said. The guy in the video seems like the type of personality that would immediately default to "I'm being censored, OH NOEZ!" when a simple technical issue could cause his tweet to show as unavailable. There are any number of reasons that this could happen and the fact that every single piece of info he has is anecdotal and without a pattern is extremely suspect. I mean, this theory could be easily disproved just by showing a left-leaning tweet where it shows as unavailable. This seems like a perfect fit for Occam's Razor.
The problem with this argument is that there have been hundreds or possibly thousands of accounts removed from Twitter since the election simply for political content.
It's not a technical issue, nor is it a secret. It's a purge of content and accounts that Twitter deems offensive because the content and the people who tweet and retweet it are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And it's not based on a failure to follow community guidelines -- or if it is, those guidelines are very unevenly enforced under the "don't shoot anyone to our left" rule.
Where's the evidence of that removal, then? The most extensive "evidence" of this is maybe 5 accounts getting removed and for every 5 on the right that got removed, there are 5 on the left. Anecdotes are not evidence.
Found the story for you, conveniently dated today and published by AP so you don't have to wonder if it's fake news.
"Also on Tuesday, Twitter said it's creating a "safe search" feature that removes tweets with potentially sensitive content and tweets from blocked and muted accounts from search results. The tweets will still exist on Twitter if people look for them, but won't appear in general search results.
Twitter is also making some replies less visible so only the most relevant conversations surface."
This is exactly what Scott Adams and commenters above complained about, and what others doubted or dismissed as technical glitches. Turns out it's not a technical problem, it's policy.
Sure, Twitter has the right to do it. But please don't dismiss the serious questions about whether they ought to do it and expect me to take you seriously. To my knowledge, unlike the tweets of Islamic terrorists that caused some of their accounts to be deleted, there has been no violence associated with the speech of the "alt-right". There has been violence on the "antifa" side with associated tweets, but there is no mention in the article of any of those accounts being shut down.
These 2 things aren't the same at all. The article is talking about tweets being excluded from search results and users being banned from creating additional accounts. Adams is talking about tweets being censored by claiming that they're unavailable when they are. He wasn't talking about either a search or a specific user being banned, only tweets being censored.
From TFA: "The video describes how Twitter gives a fake message that some tweets are no longer available, to discourage you from clicking to them. The tweets still exist, and you can access them by directly clicking the links in the tweets, but most people would not think to do that."
From the article I quoted: "Twitter is also making some replies less visible so only the most relevant conversations surface."
Way to cherry pick. The article you quoted is talking about search results. That's exactly what I said in my reply to you. You're pretending like they're the same thing when they're not.
You probably won't see this, but Scott Adams and I are not the only ones to notice this. Stay on the right side of the narrative, though; you wouldn't want to run afoul of the powers that be.
If it's true that this is throttling, a tool used to suppress and censor "any content that disagrees with [Twitter's] political views" then that would be interesting but there's nothing in this post that supports this except a strange video.
The "great video" makes a lot of claims without any proof. It's mostly a long, super aggressive, homophobic[0], rant.
Could it just be selection bias. If you mostly follow aholes on Twitter, and some tweets become unavailable because the quote feature is broken (or something), then it seems like your ahole opinion is being censored?
[0]: Uses language like "I'm the worlds biggest faggot", "fat bull dykes", etc.