Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey Admits His Company Has A Bias Perception Problem

This week, VICE reported that Twitter had been effectively “shadowbanning” particular right-wing accounts, including those of Donald Trump Jr. and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. In particular, Twitter’s search function was not automatically filling in the rest of the search term for those particular accounts. According to VICE:

The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and it’s the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search, but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.) Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review.

Is that a shadowban? Of course. But according to Brian Feldman of New York magazine, it’s not ackshually a shadowban — it’s just naturally downgrading particular opinions: “This is a side effect of a minimal measure designed to make sure that people aren’t preemptively encouraged to consume bad information from dubious sources.”

Which is, technically, a shadowban.

In fact, even Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s creator, acknowledges the problem on his feed:

A short thread addressing some issues folks are encountering as a result of our conversational health work, specifically the perception of “shadowbanning” based on content or ideology. It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work. https://t.co/MN97l7w7RF

— jack (@jack) July 25, 2018

Kayvon Beykpour, social lead at Twitter, clarified:

We’ve heard questions from some of you relating to our work to drive healthy conversation on Twitter. People are asking us 1) about the breadth and precision of our work & 2) the impact of our work on the Search experience. We wanted to address these questions transparently here.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter. This approach looks at account behavior & interactions with other accounts that violate our rules. https://t.co/FsLO6NwyNw

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

On 1) We’re always working to improve our behavior-based ranking models – their breadth and accuracy will improve over time. It’s important to note that these behavior signals are not binary, and they are one of many other signals that factor into ranking.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets. We recently publicly testified to Congress on this topic https://t.co/Zk4DL7Q3hq

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

We believe this work is really important to creating a healthier Twitter and we want to continue improving. Your feedback helps us do that so please keep it coming.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

But this is the problem: while social media giants like Twitter and Facebook insist that these are just misapplications of their algorithms, the algorithms themselves are completely non-transparent — and mistakes seem to universally hit just one side of the political aisle. There’s a reason for the lack of trust here, and transparency would help cure it. When you take it upon yourself to curate “healthy” conversation, you must define your terms — and all too often, those definitions have resulted in a bias toward those on the Left.

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