Swordsmyth
10-23-2018, 09:32 PM
With perhaps the most significant midterm election in decades nigh, big tech’s censorship of conservatives has kicked into high gear. And while Facebook’s recent purge (https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/facebooks_mid_term_purge_of_conservative_pages_wel l_underway.html) of right-leaning pages is obvious and has made news, perhaps just as destructive is the stealth censorship. A good example may be the report of WordPress’ “statistics shadowbanning” of Whatfinger New (https://www.whatfinger.com/)s (https://www.whatfinger.com/).
Whatfingeris an increasingly popular news aggregator that is run by military veterans; it’s like a non-establishment version of Drudge, only more comprehensive, more conservative, and more interesting.
And assuredly more targeted for destruction.
According to Whatfinger, the blog Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM), and other sites that have contacted Whatfinger, WordPress is now hiding referrals from the aggregator, a strategy that could alienate sites from Whatfinger by making them think it sends them no traffic. This would be a type of shadowbanning, which is “the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned,” as Wikipedia correctly puts it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning).
And what is the variation “statistics shadowbanning”? Put simply, let’s say a site is sending you 1,000 hits a day. Instead of recording and presenting this to you, your statistics service tells you that you have far fewer visits from the site — or none at all.
This is precisely what WordPress, a popular open-source website-creation company, is doing to Whatfinger (https://www.whatfinger.com/), reports the aggregator and FOTM. As the latter wrote (https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/evil-wordpress-shadow-bans-whatfinger-news#comments) October 13, “Each day, we get hundreds and often thousands of referrals from Whatfinger, for which FOTM is most grateful. Beginning yesterday, I noticed something odd: There were no referrals from Whatfinger!”
It doesn’t seem that this was a mere glitch, as FOTM reports that WordPress stats were still presenting hits from other entities — just not Whatfinger. Moreover, it’s not just FOTM reporting this odd phenomenon, either. As Whatfinger wrote (https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/evil-wordpress-shadow-bans-whatfinger-news#comments) in a statement:
Many sites have now sent screenshots, sites that we send thousands of people to daily who are all noticing WordPress ‘shadowbanning of stats’ — we all now need to know the truth. Are all conservative sites targets? Will they blame some algorithm as Facebook likes to do? Can’t be just Whatfinger, since we are new and nowhere near the size of other sites just yet.
As for FOTM’s situation, its administrator provides more detail, writing:
... I went to FOTM‘s stats page, only to discover that WordPress had changed the referrals of the day before, Oct. 11, to remove all referrals from Whatfinger! The problem is, a day before, I had seen thousands of referrals from Whatfiinger [sic], which now had vanished, retroactively expunged by WordPress.
I then clicked on the referrals for September 29, 2018 — a day when FOTM had a record 35,438 unique views. I remember seeing there were thousands of referrals from Whatfinger that day, which WordPress now has retroactively expunged....
This matters because traffic is websites’ lifeblood — and your apparent traffic level will determine your marketability. Why would people advertise on your site, for instance, if they believe you offer little exposure? No advertising means no revenue, and this means a restricted capacity to spread your message.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/30430-is-statistics-shadowbanning-the-latest-big-tech-salvo-against-conservatives
Whatfingeris an increasingly popular news aggregator that is run by military veterans; it’s like a non-establishment version of Drudge, only more comprehensive, more conservative, and more interesting.
And assuredly more targeted for destruction.
According to Whatfinger, the blog Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM), and other sites that have contacted Whatfinger, WordPress is now hiding referrals from the aggregator, a strategy that could alienate sites from Whatfinger by making them think it sends them no traffic. This would be a type of shadowbanning, which is “the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned,” as Wikipedia correctly puts it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning).
And what is the variation “statistics shadowbanning”? Put simply, let’s say a site is sending you 1,000 hits a day. Instead of recording and presenting this to you, your statistics service tells you that you have far fewer visits from the site — or none at all.
This is precisely what WordPress, a popular open-source website-creation company, is doing to Whatfinger (https://www.whatfinger.com/), reports the aggregator and FOTM. As the latter wrote (https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/evil-wordpress-shadow-bans-whatfinger-news#comments) October 13, “Each day, we get hundreds and often thousands of referrals from Whatfinger, for which FOTM is most grateful. Beginning yesterday, I noticed something odd: There were no referrals from Whatfinger!”
It doesn’t seem that this was a mere glitch, as FOTM reports that WordPress stats were still presenting hits from other entities — just not Whatfinger. Moreover, it’s not just FOTM reporting this odd phenomenon, either. As Whatfinger wrote (https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/evil-wordpress-shadow-bans-whatfinger-news#comments) in a statement:
Many sites have now sent screenshots, sites that we send thousands of people to daily who are all noticing WordPress ‘shadowbanning of stats’ — we all now need to know the truth. Are all conservative sites targets? Will they blame some algorithm as Facebook likes to do? Can’t be just Whatfinger, since we are new and nowhere near the size of other sites just yet.
As for FOTM’s situation, its administrator provides more detail, writing:
... I went to FOTM‘s stats page, only to discover that WordPress had changed the referrals of the day before, Oct. 11, to remove all referrals from Whatfinger! The problem is, a day before, I had seen thousands of referrals from Whatfiinger [sic], which now had vanished, retroactively expunged by WordPress.
I then clicked on the referrals for September 29, 2018 — a day when FOTM had a record 35,438 unique views. I remember seeing there were thousands of referrals from Whatfinger that day, which WordPress now has retroactively expunged....
This matters because traffic is websites’ lifeblood — and your apparent traffic level will determine your marketability. Why would people advertise on your site, for instance, if they believe you offer little exposure? No advertising means no revenue, and this means a restricted capacity to spread your message.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/30430-is-statistics-shadowbanning-the-latest-big-tech-salvo-against-conservatives