When even someone on the LEFT starts noticing it… the jig is up for Team Twitter’s pretense of innocence.
Vice– hardly an ‘ally’ of right-wing ideas and values has held Twitter’s feet to the fire, proving that they’ve been ‘shadow-banning’ (suppressing the reach) of prominent Conservatives.
Twitter had also been suppressing right-wing accounts from popping up in searches where the user types in part of the name, and a list of suggestions pops up.
Vice put together some evidence to prove their point.
The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and it’s the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search, but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.)
Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.
At least THEY understand that suppression hurts EVERYBODY in the long run, and not just the ‘other team’. And for that, they deserve due credit.
Twitter’s troll hunt, however, has ensnared some of the most prominent Republicans in the country. Type in the names of McDaniel, conservative members of Congress like Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, and Trump Jr.’s spokesman Andrew Surabian, for example, and Twitter’s drop-down search bar does not show their profiles. The search menu also does not display the verified profile of Rep. Devin Nunes of California, only his unverified one that he seldom uses to post.
That limits their visibility and the ease of finding their profiles compared to their liberal counterparts.
Related story:
Petition: Demand That ‘Social Media’ Co’s Cease To Stifle Conservative Speech – Sign Here!
You can tell they’re no friend of the political Right, because they recite some of the same old stories about ‘fake news’ and work on the presumption of racism. Even so, they’ve got some things right:
Even if the shadow banning is more of a bug than a feature, the demotion of these prominent Republicans could be a political liability for the social media company.
Conservatives in and out of Congress have been claiming for months — with varying amounts of evidence — that Big Tech companies are censoring voices on the right. The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee convened not one but two hearings on the subject in recent months, including one with pro-Trump social media stars Diamond and Silk, who argued that Facebook had been intentionally diminishing the reach of their content. The second hearing went down just last week where representatives from Twitter, Google, and Facebook were subjected to grilling by conservatives.
“It is curious that these allegations would arise the week following Congressman Gaetz’s heated exchange with Twitter senior executives before the House Judiciary Committee,” a spokesman for Gaetz told VICE News.
The allegations of bias haven’t been limited to Congress either. McDaniel and President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote a letter to Facebook and Twitter in June asking for the companies to conduct public reviews of potential bias against conservative content on the platform.
The bias comes as no surprise to us, having reported on that ‘civil war’ story their CEO was so fond of… you haven’t forgotten about THAT already, have you?
Leftist Want A ‘New Civil War’ – This Post Is Disturbing
The hard left — and that includes media Giants because the CEO of Twitter retweeted the story we’re referencing here — literally doesn’t care what you or I think. We are not people to be engaged and persuaded, we are obstacles to be coerced or destroyed.
Source: VICE News
Even some people who are naturally hostile to the Conservative objections have begun to take notice, like Axios reporter on the Presidential beat, Jonathan Swan:
https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1022175120373309441
It’s good to see there are still people who value the principles of unhindered political speech above any advantage that might be gained by having that speech stifled, whether it’s a government or a corporation doing the stifling.
God bless those who realize that those who would silence our enemies are not necessarily our friends. If you don’t understand how that works, it’s time to go back and re-read “The Hangman” by Maurice Ogden.
