I quit twitter: I am on plerb and freezepeach. And today, I noted that Linux Voice has been reporting this: and the sensitive say that defending Linus is not acceptable.

For Twitter has gone full fascist.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

The pattern of shadowban reports, which skews towards the alt-right, the populist right, and cultural libertarians, follows close on the heels of Twitter’s establishment of a “Trust and Safety Council” packed with left-wing advocacy groups, as well as Islamic research centre the Wahid Institute.

It also follows my prediction that Twitter would use its influence to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by muffling conservative voices on the platform.

For close to a year now, Breitbart has covered Twitter’s march towards political censorship. In May 2015 Allum Bokhari reported that the site had begun to experiment with shadowbans, ostensibly to protect users from abuse. Then, as now, it was suspected that “protecting users from abuse” was an excuse to implement a system that would later be used for political censorship.

With shadowbans now confirmed by an inside source, there is little room for doubt that the platform is intent on silencing conservatives. Furthermore, it has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for transparency, concealing its shadowbanning system from users and hiding its political bias behind a veneer of opposition to online abuse.

I noted in Wired (read over lunch, and disposed of, like Linux Voice the noise now outweighs the signal) that social media is now seen as a player in the US elections. And it seems that the political class take this seriously: they clearly have not learned from the last election in the UK, or Australia, or NZ where twitter would suggest the left will win and the right rolled them. (Canada was the exception: they have elected their muppet, just as the USA elected Obama).

Most people are not on twitter.

Most people talk quietly.

And when they get annoyed with those who tell them they are racist, or irredeemably corrupt, they… revolt.

And the revolt will come: neither the left nor the right trust their established leaders. One hopes that we can claw our way back to sanity. But that is not the way to bet when it comes to corporations. Divest from Twitter, make your facebook profile as bland as possible, and build other networks now. For twitter will fall.