Dear Friends,
It seems to me, when companies like Twitter shadow ban users, for any reason, they are committing fraud. Fraud is a very serious crime and is usually treated extremely severely. Fraud is when a party to a transaction does not act in good faith. If the transaction happens, one party is defrauded and gets little or no value, in exchange for something of actual value. Therefore, fraud is immoral as well as illegal, because lying is implicit in fraud. This is how fraud is different than asymmetric knowledge. In asymmetric knowledge, one party has important information about a transaction, or one of the articles of value that will be exchanged… that the other does not have. Every exchange has asymmetric knowledge. What Twitter does when it shadow bans someone however… is an outright lie.
Fraud is always based on a lie. Telling someone they are buying a chicken in a bag, and when the person gets home… it turns out to be a cat instead, is an example of a well known fraud. It is called buying a pig in a poke. The seller claims there is a chicken in the bag, and it moves like there is a chicken in it, so the buyer, or in this case the victim, exchanges money, a thing of value, for the “chicken” in a bag. That it is actually a cat means the seller intentionally lied, since it is unlikely they mistook a cat for a chicken. Unless the seller also bought the “chicken” in a bag from someone else, who bought it from another, and no one looked… leading to a Schrodinger’s paradox. Which is unlikely. It is far more likely, using Occam’s razor, that the exchange was fraudulent.
The revenue end of business model of firms like Twitter is based on users. The more users the greater the value for ads and the like. Moreover, the more users are active the more provable the numbers of users. If I started a company and only had four users, all my own family, I could not demand the same price for ads on my site, as a site that has a million users… or as Twitter claims to have, nine hundred seventy million. Almost a billion users that the firm is getting revenue from. I wonder how many of those users, using Twitter in good faith, believing their voice is equal to everyone else on the platform… are being lied to? How many are shadow banned, and thus while they are using Twitter in good faith, increasing Twitter’s profit, they are being sold a pig in a poke?
Shadow banning is by definition a lie, it states clearly that some users of Twitter have been told their “tweets” have been reaching their followers, when in fact they have not. Which is obviously a lie. Moreover, it is Twitter’s management openly admitting that some users are more equal than others… while they tell their subscribers all are equal! Selling their service as such! Which is a patent lie, known by the executives and employees of that firm, to be a lie, perpetrated on people they are getting revenue from! Now, selling someone something that is materially different than what is promised, like saying all voices are equal, while some are less equal than others, is exactly that. Selling something that is materially different than what is advertised. Which is fraud.
The claim that users cannot be considered to have lost a thing of value is spurious. It is misleading because it discounts the value of a human being’s time. Minimum wage in the US is around Ten bucks an hour, so at the very minimum, we can say that shadow banned users of Twitter are defrauded ten dollars for every hour they spend on Twitter. If one percent of users are shadow banned, and the average user spends an hour a day on Twitter, that means Twitter is defrauding their users of ninety seven thousand dollars of value every day. I should think that is significant enough to open an investigation and prosecution. The elite would move heaven and earth to destroy you or I… for taking a ten spot. Are ten black dots more odious to the elite than ninety seven thousand black dots?
Sincerely,
John Pepin
