Is X Now Making Some Retweets Un-Retweetable?

What happened here? Below is a reply which I posted taking issue with a detail in a tweet by the great Hart Group:

Leaving aside the substance of the tweet, what is significant here is that it was reposted by Thomas Binder, who was tagged in the original Hart tweet, but that his retweet, as can be seen below, did not generate a single additional retweet. The other retweets are either my own or by followers of mine.

But how is this possible given that Thomas Binder has over 80,000 followers? We all know from experience on Twitter 1.0 that a retweet from a high impact-factor account would have a multiplier effect, generating a series of secondary retweets which would generate further retweets in turn. This was a veritable law of nature on old Twitter. But in this case, the apple did not fall to the ground.

The same exact thing occurred with a tweet of my recent Christmas article on BioNTech’s “gift to God”. It was retweeted by Nick Hudson, whose account again has over 80,000 followers, but this did not have any multiplier effect or indeed any effect at all. There were no additional retweets. Nick was kind enough to call attention to the issue himself the next day: namely, in the quote tweet reproduced below.

This quote-tweet then generated a ‘normal’ level of engagement from Nick’s followers and presumably followers’ followers and so on, as would be expected. This would appear to teach us that quote-tweeting, as opposed to retweeting, is a way of getting around a visibility filter – at least until X decides that it is not and closes this loophole in its visibility-filtering algorithm.

I have in fact encountered this phenomenon of the apparently unretweetable retweet many times on X in recent months. (Here is another example.)

But why would either of the above tweets be subject to visibility filtering anyway? Why is any given tweet subject to visibility filtering for that matter? On X, we do not know.

We know that X engages in visibility filtering because it says so. See below, for instance, from the X Help Center:

And we know that the X visibility-filtering algorithm includes “safety labels” which are applied to accounts or posts, in order to suppress their reach. These are the labels to which X CEO Linda Yaccarino was alluding when she famously boasted that if users post “lawful but awful” content, they get “labelled and deamplified”.

A selection of ‘safety labels’ which are meant to suppress various forms of ‘misinformation’ can be seen below. They come from the published portion of the Twitter/X algorithm here.

But the difference between these labels and the ‘misleading’ labels which tweets would be hit with on the old Twitter and which could lead to account suspension is that the latter were publicly visible, whereas the new Twitter/X ‘safety labels’ are only visible in the back office. We do not know when X is applying them to our posts or accounts, and hence X has no need to justify their application.

We knew what old Twitter was censoring as ‘misinformation’, and hence we also knew that it was not misinformation or at least could decide for ourselves. We have no idea what is being treated as ‘civic’, ‘crisis’, ‘medical’ or ‘generic’ misinformation on X and hence we have no way of contesting this treatment.

This new system of covert censorship is obviously susceptible to far greater abuse and manipulation by the powers-that-be – for instance, the European Commission, whose censorship demands X is legally required to satisfy under the Digital Services Act – than the old system of (predominantly) open censorship.

Perhaps what is being “labelled and deamplified” are simply politically inconvenient facts.