Posted by hn1986 9/2/2025
These shadowban stories are so often just hearsay and anecdotes from random users just feeding weird conspiracy vibes. Never go on a user saying they don't see something, there's too many variables in the mix from their usage patterns to sure, actual weird Elon/X algorithm tweaks at play.
From the last paragraph:
"We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds."
Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get.
Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?
There can be an element of force to how they win but it is not the whole picture.
Have to accept that there are a lot of people with reasons to support these politicians
However, Twitter wasn't instrumental in getting Erdogan elected in 2003.
TV/Radio has been his thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-...
Internet companies (like all companies) can and indeed must choose how they behave. "We follow all laws inside each country" is one such choice, but it's not a special privileged choice that absolves the company of criticism for its behavior.
They took a pretty good stab at it in 1948: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
;)
To be honest, you could restrict your compliance to only the laws of the country you're based in. American companies follow American laws, etc. Then move your company to where you most agree with the laws.
If you don't like X (understandable) then it's much better to not visit it voluntarily than by a top-down block
Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it.
The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.
I like how Elon is so eager to bend his knee to censor requests from authoritarian "friend" governments like India and Turkey
but when the request comes from a supposedly "left-leaning" judiciary like Brazil to suspend accounts that were posting misinformation, suddenly he stands on his principles and defy the orders.
This is a nothing burger.
Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.