Ehh...it's bullshit double speak and everyone knows it.

First of all, shadow banning doesn't really exist...because that's not what they're doing. They're doing a number of things to decrease visibility of profiles due to a whole host of reasons. You could call all of these things together shadow banning...but individual accounts might be subject to lowered visibility in a number of ways and not others. It's not really likely due to some political reason as far as I'm aware...though I'm sure they're dumb enough to give the power to individual employees, allowing a whole mess of abuse.

There are various terms that are outright banned from search. That's utter bullshit if you ask me. So if you search for a number of things, like adult related things for example, or things that could be adult related, you won't see jack shit, or you'll see a severely limited set of results. When you look at the results though, and what is censored, it's pretty obvious that their code is shit. Now, having an adult filter of some sort is understandable...but a user should be allowed to disable it. Twitter is, after all, by their own TOS supposed to be only for 18+. They don't just censor adult related things from search though. They don't publish anything about how their search is censored either, so people don't really have any clue what is censored. Unless there's a list out there someone has compiled of banned search words. Not everything is outright banned though. Some things just have somewhat censored results.

There are also a number of activities that set off things in their code to sort of bury accounts in various different ways. Of course they don't tell you any of the things that might set off their code to censor your account from feeds or search or have somewhat limited visibility. But, they are censoring or "shadow banning" accounts.

This is kind of understandable, because there are tons of idiots out there pushing for these sites to censor in certain ways. They want them to get rid of supposed terrorist accounts that spam bullshit for example, because to those idiots, their hundreds or thousands of followers sounds like a lot. Likely the majority of them are bots being followed by bots though. The irony is that if they weren't idiots, they could actually use such activity to be able to find wannabe terrorists and actual terrorists easier. Hell, they could even actually load up spyware onto terrorist machines, if they don't already.

They have a massive platform and they have quite a number of things that they want to censor for quite a number of reason. Maybe bot spam. Maybe russian spam bots. Maybe porn spam bots. Maybe just normal porn. Often the adult content is one of the first to suffer the censorship. It's amazing we're still reproducing at all considering how much we wanna deny that we use sexual reproduction.

I know enough from looking at what they do and do not block in different ways to know their code is absolute shit. The activity people are calling shadow banning is actually a number of different things and different levels and they pretty much completely ignore the massive number of accounts that are completely missed or are falsely tagged, unless it catches major press, then they deny it at the same time as reversing it.

Basically they got really shit code and some kind of flags that go off to make accounts less visible. The reason for the controversy is because the code is shit. But, it should be controversial regardless, because they are censoring accounts, not just spam bots. Hell, they do a horrible job of actually catching the spam bots. It wouldn't even be that hard. They musta spent all their money on server admins and code optimizers and not hired a single regex expert.