Twitter Admits It Hid Tweets About HBO's QAnon Docuseries

Q: Into the Storm was a six-part series that aired on HBO Max. The visibility of the series was limited on the social network after it was released.

The director of the series tried to pay to boost his own account on the social networking site after it was revealed that it was limiting the reach of the series. He wasn't allowed to buy promotion for his post. The film was deemed to be in violation of the social network's guidelines andmanually reviewed by the ad department. The documentary criticizes the role that social media has played in the spread of the disease.

The production house of Hoback reached out to the communications team to request help because they believed the response in error. Three days later, a response came. To Hoback, the suppression was intentional.

The decision not to allow promotion of this documentary via advertising on the platform was made in 2021. The client won't be able to promote this content.

It's not clear if there have been additional actions taken to limit the visibility of Hoback's account. The company has said that since January of 2021, accounts sharing QAnon-related content have been excluded from features.

The director said that they shined a light on their censorship practices in the series. Two of the six episodes raise questions about the moderation efforts of the social networking site, including its role in promoting the Christchurch shooter's manifesto, and argue that it was key to spreading conspiracy theories. The company began cracking down on content after the attack on the Capitol.

The way to unraveling QAnon was to reveal the underlying mechanics and players behind it, not censoring all discussion around the topic, according to Hoback.

Adam McKay, the director of The Big Short and Don't Look Up, blasted the decision ahead of the Oscars last month.

Hoback was shocked to learn that the company had taken this particular approach to content that assesses the movement.

An expert on conspiracy culture agreed. The author of The Storm is Upon Us told Gizmodo that bidding works like Q: Into the Storm, where people are curious about Q only half the story.

Q: Into the Storm is the culmination of a three-year effort by Hoback to unmask and demystify the forces behind the conspiracy-based movement. The movement wormed its way into the Trump White House, where the conditions were more hospitable, and into the halls of Congress, where it tried to overturn the 2020 election. The documentary about online privacy, called Terms and Conditions May Apply, was the first to rise to prominence.

The director went in search of the people responsible for posting the Q-Drops messages, which gave life to a variety of far-out conspiracy theories. The main suspect is Ron Watkins, the admin of the forum for years. In one exchange, Watkins acknowledges spending years teaching normies how to do intelligence work, and in what Hoback frames as a major slip-up, appears to acknowledge he has been doing Q.

The New York Times published a story about research carried out by two separate teams of forensic linguists, which found evidence to support Hoback.

The conclusions in the series were reinforced by The New York Times.

More than 70,000 accounts were reportedly suspended at the start of the purge. The company said at the time that it was discussing ways to power research into QAnon and coordinated harmful activity on the platform. Other measures were taken against accounts that the company said were mostly engaged in spreading QAnon content. They included limiting visibility across search, replies, and timelines, as well as a ban against being recommended to others.

The production team was told in March that any promotion of Q: Into the Storm would not be aligned with previous actions.

suppression tactics found by Into the Storm were either useless or counter productive. The suspension of accounts on the website has an outsized influence on public discourse.

In recent weeks, there have been vague allegations of censorship flung with the support of Republican lawmakers. Donald Trump, who was suspended for inciting violence, was not the only one. They form part of a larger narrative that paints internet giants as hostile to conservative views.

Researchers at MIT and Yale are trying to uncover the truth behind the claims of anti-conservative bias on social media. Republican accounts are more likely to be suspended than their Democratic counterparts according to their analysis. The researchers said that the Republican users had posted misinformation at a higher rate than Democrats. The research showed that there were deep partisan divides when it came to defining misinformation and the actions of the social media companies.

After campaigning publicly against what he called "de facto bias" in the automated tool used to moderate Twitter, Musk struck a deal to purchase the company for $44 billion. Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated is the digital town square.

Senator Mark Warner, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that he had been impressed by the way that the company had addressed false, deceptive, and manipulated content.

Republicans who participated in the MIT/Yale study viewed the curtailment of access to QAnon content as political discrimination, even as they held that individuals were free to be anti-QAnon without being anti-conservative.