Is Twitter shadow-banning and otherwise censoring conservatives?
The answer depends. Ask President Trump, and you’ll get a yes, with an oath to stop the practice. Ask Twitter chieftain Jack Dorsey, and you’ll get a no.
Whom do you believe, given Twitter’s record?
Trump’s Tweets
On Saturday, President Trump tweeted twice about Twitter’s habit of blocking conservatives and Republicans, and of banning those with whom the Twitter censors disagree.
“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” Trump tweeted. “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”
But that wasn’t all The Donald had to say. Two more early morning tweets followed:
Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all…
….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!
A month ago, Trump tweeted likewise after Twitter was caught blocking search results that would return conservative or Republican names. Like a kid pulling his hand away from the cookie jar, Twitter quickly reversed course after it was caught.
That’s when Trump promised a probe: “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Shadow-banning is essentially blocking or banning a user’s posts without him knowing it. It works by preventing others from seeing the shadowbanned user’s new posts in their feed, unless they search for the shadowbanned user specifically.
Dorsey Says No
Naturally, Twitter denies it all.
CEO Jack Dorsey, talking to CNN’s Brian Stelter, claims that his social media platform does not censor conservatives, even if it is “left-leaning.”
“Left-leaning” is one way to put it, but anyway, Dorsey said, obviously sensitive to the charge of bias, that Twitter has to do a better job. “We realize that more and more people have fear of companies like ours,” Dorsey admitted.
“Are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints?” he asked. “We are not. Period. We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior.”
Trump Is Right
But Trump and his supporters have at least two good reasons not to believe the hirsute CEO, and neither is Twitter’s seven-day suspension of Alex Jones and his Infowars website.
Project Veritas, which produces undercover video of liberals admitting all sorts of things, tricked two Twitter employees into admitting that the company’s leftist employees do indeed censor conservatives. It’s done “behind closed doors,” one said, while another, explaining what a shadow ban is, said the practice gives Twitter “ultimate control” of what users say on the platform.
That employee explained that Twitter doesn’t want to get caught because the truth would embarrass the company.
As well, in an interview with the New York Times, Twitter’s co-founder, having told the Times that the Internet is “broken,” apologized for whatever role his platform played in electing Trump, who claimed that Twitter was the key to his victory.
“It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” Evan Williams told the Times. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”
Another Example
Aside from Twitter, the leftist bias of the tech giants is demonstrated in what happened to James Damore, an engineer at Google whose job went down in flames when he crossed the company’s leftist diversity cult.
Google fired Damore, a young white man, after he penned a memo that objected to Google’s anti-conservative biases and accused the company of being an “ideological echo chamber.” One of Damore’s most “offensive” claims is that “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.”
Damore filed a class-action suit against Google alleging discrimination.
As well, Facebook just apologized to PragerU for blocking 99 percent of its posts. After PragerU officials complained on Facebook that “9 posts have been completely censored reaching 0 of our 3 million followers,” the social media behemoth claimed it “mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don’t break our standards.”
Image: screenshot of Twitter.com
