It Seems Censorship Is Back On X

Written by Martin Neil and Norman Fenton on April 23, 2024. Posted in Current News

At 9.50am on 20 April 2024 Norman published this article about his trip to the conference in Rome challenging the WHO and the ‘official’ covid narrative

He also then immediately posted this post about it, tagging some of the other big-name speakers at the event including Jay Bhattacharya, Meryl Ness, Kat Lindley and Rob Roos – all of whom follow Norman and who Norman follows on X:

Although the post avoided using any keywords like ‘covid’ and ‘vaccine’ that have, in the past, automatically led to shadow banning, and which now only leads to shadow banning of a subset of dissidents (more on this later), when ‘misinformation spreaders’ like us post, it did however provide the link to the substack article reporting on the event.

As is now standard practice for X, we strongly suspect that this link to substack ensured the post would now be shadow banned. However, the extent of the shadow banning, and subsequent bizarre algorithm effects were beyond anything we have seen before.

First, Norman noticed that in the 12 hours following the original tweet, there were fewer than 1K impressions and no replies (Norman has 81K followers and, although shadow banned, he has not had any tweet receive less than 3K impressions for a long time).

This clearly indicated it had been hidden from the big following accounts who follow Norman and who Norman had tagged in the post.

Then at 10.31pm Norman got a message from Martin saying that he had posted this reply to his tweet and asking if Norman had seen it.

Norman had in fact not seen it and did not get the standard alert to Martin’s reply from X.

But, within minutes of Martin posting the reply, several others including Jay Bhattacharya and Kat Lindley who had been tagged, also replied! So, Martin’s reply triggered the X algorithm to show the post, at least to people who had been tagged in it and who follow Norman.

This confirms something that we had recently noted about the X algorithm. It seems that for shadow banned accounts, the X algorithm relaxes the shadow ban for posts that complain about lack of reach.

Presumably, this is done to ‘demonstrate’ that they don’t really shadow ban in order to prevent people getting the evidence that they do.

Then within the next 20 minutes the post went from less than 1k impressions in the 12 hours since it was posted to 6k impression!

But things got even more bizarre.

First, having noticed that Jay’s reply was posted 3 minutes AFTER Martin’s, it was now showing as being posted 3 minutes BEFORE his. So, it appears that the algorithm was doing these changes to cover up the duplicity.

Even worse, however, was that, although Norman was still not receiving notification of retweets or replies to the original post. Norman manually checked and noticed that Jay had retweeted it and in doing so Norman saw that he was no longer following Jay.

Many other people have noticed the X algorithm automatically unfollowing people and not alerting either party that it has done so. This probably explains why accounts like Norman’s have not added any significant new followers for months.

In Martin’s case it has not significantly increased in over 18 months.

Sex bots

Martin also notes that in the last few days he has publicised two of the biggest and most important studies to date on X reporting claims that the vaccines are not safe or effective. These posts also generated minimal impressions and were widely ignored by the ‘big hitters on X’, suggesting they didn’t see them.

These posts covered the Czech study and the Italian study. The first post on the Czech vaccine study only got 29k impressions on X and the second post, on the Italian vaccine study, only got 21k impressions.

Also, each of these posts were hit by sex bots almost immediately after publication.

This is not the first time our posts have been automatically replied to by sex bots. Our assumption is that by automatically deploying sex bots our post can be down rated, and subsequently hidden, by the algorithm because X does so to protect the delicate sensibilities of readers on X.

Freedom of reach but not freedom of speech

Here is a clip from Elon Musk’s interview with the new Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino, from April 18, 2023. In this clip they discuss Twitter’s new “Freedom of Speech Not Freedom of Reach” policy.

We had naïvely originally imagined that these ‘freedom of reach’ restrictions applied across the spectrum of covid dissent, whenever ‘no pandemic’ or vaccines etc. were mentioned, or that we would only be censored if we linked to our substack but it is clear something potentially more sinister is going on.

El Gato Malo, and others, have commented on X’s ‘freedom of reach’ policy:

“@elonmusk

this really needs to be fixed. without freedom of reach, freedom of speech on this platform becomes a privilege without a point. it supports the sort of abilene paradoxes that are used to gaslight the majority of a society into thinking that it is a minority and that a few unpopular fringe groups have widespread support.”

Other big accounts are posting on topics we covered, sometimes, years ago, and they are not currently being censored. Here are some examples of posts that have suffered no censorship in 2024:

Readers of this substack know we documented the pneumonia story in great detail here in August 2023 (and we were not the first people to report it). This has been largely ignored on mainstream twitter until now.

And this from @TheChiefNerd on the vaccinated being categorised as unvaccinated:

Note that we have no issue with the contents of either of these posts, nor do we know anything objectionable about the posters themselves. The only point we wish to make is that neither has been censored on X for posting on topics we are currently censored for.

Of course, some will claim there are perhaps some innocent explanations for all of this. That we are unpopular or hateful or lack relevance is a possible explanation. Or that some posts are so powerful or compelling that they went viral and could not be contained by X’s algorithms.

Or maybe censorship on X operates differently in the UK? Or X has a preference for US sources over UK ones? Or that there is a powerful non-determinism at play in the algorithms used by X or those waging information warfare on X.

Or we are paranoid!

But there is another perhaps more uncomfortable possible conclusion we might arrive at. That dissent from particular individuals or groups is positively allowed or even approved on X, whilst that from others, such as us, is not.

Hence it not the message but the source of the message, or the timing of the message, that is being censored. Hence who gets to tell you the ‘vaccines are bad’ might matter to Elon Musk and X, much more than the actual message imparted.

In this way X appears to be no different from MSM: politics, influence and money may hold sway to varying extents. And this determines what messages people see, when and by whom.

Likewise, this is a US election year after all and many in the covid dissident movement have made plain their political affiliations and allegiances.

We, being British, clearly have less skin in that particular game, so maybe we have no grounds to complain about censorship on US owned social media platforms.

However you look at it, events do suggest that genuine free speech is gone from X and won’t be returning anytime soon.

See more here substack.com

Header image: Emo Insights

Bold emphasis added

Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Trackback from your site.