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Twitter Appears To Shadowban Videos Of Italy’s First Female Incoming Prime Minister

   DailyWire.com
ROME, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 26: Conservative party Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni speaks to media and supporters following the first results on the Italian general election at the Parco Dei Principi Hotel on September 26, 2022 in Rome, Italy. The snap election was triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister Mario Draghi in July, following the collapse of his big-tent coalition of leftist, right-wing and centrist parties. (Photo by Alessandra Benedetti - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Twitter appeared to shadowban videos of Italy’s first female incoming Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni.

According to a number of Twitter users, attempts to search for videos of the newly-elected conservative leader returned no results. The Daily Wire attempted a video search on the platform, and the results are displayed below:

Search parameters: Giorgia Meloni, videos. Screenshot/Twitter

Screenshot/Twitter

Recent congressional candidate Matthew Foldi (R-MD) shared a video of himself completing the search in real time, showing results under the “top” results tab, but none when he selected “videos.”

https://twitter.com/MatthewFoldi/status/1575551501258596352

But the videos themselves were not actually gone. In fact, Meloni’s pinned tweet, posted at the top of her Twitter feed and visible to anyone who clicks on her profile, is a video.

That disparity — the fact that a video search returned no results at all despite the videos still clearly being present on the platform, led a number of users to surmise that videos featuring Meloni had been “shadowbanned.”

As Builtin.com explained, “shadowbans block users or individual pieces of content without letting the offending user know they’ve been blocked. To a shadowbanned user, the site continues to function as normal — they can still make posts and engage with other people’s posts — but to others, the user appears to have gone silent.”

“Searching for Giorgia Meloni will bring up zero photo and video results,” Klaus Arminius tweeted. “In order to protect democracy, Twitter shadow banned the democratically elected Italian PM from its platform.”

https://twitter.com/Klaus_Arminius/status/1575548725631791105

“Twitter’s shadow ban of democratically elected right wing Italian PM Giorgia Meloni is actually the stuff of dystopian gaslighting. Meloni isn’t the fascist. Twitter is. Change the words ‘a Government’ with ‘Social Media,’” Alex Phillips said.

Twitter was not the only platform to catch heat for allegedly stifling content featuring the newly-elected prime minister. YouTube temporarily removed a 2019 speech Meloni gave at the World Congress of Families — in which she defended the family unit and ripped into “woke” ideology — claiming that it had been “removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

YouTube later reinstated the video, telling The Daily Wire in a statement, “Upon careful review, we determined this video is not violative of our Community Guidelines and have reinstated it.”

Amanda Prestigiacomo contributed to this report.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Twitter Appears To Shadowban Videos Of Italy’s First Female Incoming Prime Minister