Was Twitter "Throttling" certain political tweets in 2017?

Question

Scott Adams claimed in Feb 2017:

You might have clicked on my misleading tweet to get to this page. I had to disguise the content so Twitter wouldn’t throttle it.

Here’s why…

This morning I tweeted a link to a great video that describes in detail how Twitter “throttles” the tweets of any content that disagrees with their political views. The video describes how Twitter gives a fake message that some tweets are no longer available, to discourage you from clicking to them. The tweets still exist, and you can access them by directly clicking the links in the tweets, but most people would not think to do that.

Scott Adams discusses a NSFW¹ video which accused Twitter of this behaviour.

The question is: Is Twitter throttling tweets of its users, as Scott Adams claims?

^{1 - contains foul language.}

Answer 1

In short, No.

Mr. Adams' complaint mirrors a common accusation by conservatives and boils down to two points:

1. "I am not getting the likes and engament I believe I should be getting."
2. "This is the result of deliberate sabotage of the algorithm to unfairly suppress my speech."

The so-called "Twitter Files" and the "expose" by Weiss that are referenced in the other answer get touted around a lot as "proof" for this, even though the actual contents disagree:

Weiss characterized these practices as censorship and as evidence of shadow banning, which Twitter disputed, largely on the basis of its different definition of "shadow ban".[42] Twitter distinguished visibility filtering from shadow banning, which it defined as making "content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it."[42][41]

The documents Weiss discussed focused on individuals popular with the right-wing and suggested the moderation practices were politically motivated[39][41]—a long-standing claim among American conservatives,[42] which Twitter has denied.[38]

An internal study Twitter conducted in 2018 found its algorithms favored the political right.[41][43][44]

Wired and Slate described the policy by which moderators were unable to act on high-profile conservative accounts without first escalating to high-level management as "preferential treatment",[37][45] since this effectively limited Twitter's enforcement of their content policies on these accounts.[46]

Weiss did not reveal how many accounts overall were de-amplified nor the politics of those who were,[47] and this lack of context made it difficult to glean any conclusions on the matter.[41]

If anything, this suggests that rather than "shadow-banning", high profile conservatives were handled with proverbial kid gloves and permitted to post comments that would get other people suspended or banned.

Answer 2

was there 'visibility filtering'

Yes, despite claims otherwise.

We do not shadow ban.

blog.twitter.com/

Weiss contended that "visibility filtering" was merely Twitter's in-house term for "shadow banning".

Ref: Twitter files (Wikipedia) and The free press

Was there ideological bias when it comes to content moderation?

The free press seems to say yes.

“They say they didn’t put their thumb on the scale,” Musk, who became CEO of Twitter in October, told The Free Press. “But they were pressing the thumb hard in favor of the left. If left, you could get away with death threats, and nothing would happen. If right, you could get suspended for retweeting a picture of a Trump rally.”

Other sources Gizmodo Forbes 1 and Forbes 2 dispute this claim.