December 13, 2022
It is possible that there is a new person atop the left’s “Most Disliked Person” list. And that person, replacing former President Donald Trump, is the new owner of Twitter, Tesla owner Elon Musk. Or maybe Musk will merely be added to the list below Trump’s name.
Twitter and Facebook have long been criticized for censoring certain kinds of tweets and posts, including those of conservatives and those whose opinions run counter to liberal thinking. Now that Twitter is not owned and operated by someone who believes in censorship, things are changing. And evidence to support the long-held beliefs that social media sites were infringing on free speech is coming to light.
Not only is the censorship of certain topics now shown to be fact, but some, perhaps many, of the items censored were valid and important.
One conservative user, “Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — a longstanding opponent of a COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns" was placed on the site’s secret blacklists, as reported by Fox News, which is as bad to the left was Twitter was good.
This man is no average guy expressing an uneducated opinion. Yet, in its efforts to protect a faulty narrative, Twitter blacklisted him.
Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, posted on Twitter earlier this month that, “A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users.”
Her revelations are all based upon information provided by Musk from Twitter files he has released.
"Twitter denied that it does such things," Weiss noted. "In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said, ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added, ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.’" Former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey said as much in a Congressional hearing.
One technique used is visibility filtering, a senior Twitter employee told Weiss: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.”
A post on msn.com offered the following: “Liberals on Twitter panned the latest ‘Twitter Files’ revelations from Elon Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi Friday which showed the internal communications of Twitter leading up to the decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the social media platform in early 2021.
“The third ‘Twitter Files’ installment – this time dubbed, ‘THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP,’ presented documents showing that Twitter staff banned Trump not solely based on tweets he made during January 6th, but on the ‘context surrounding’ Trump and his supporters’ actions ‘over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.’”
And more inside information: A member of Facebook’s Oversight Board and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning Schmidt, said, “Free speech is not an absolute human right,” at a Politico Europe event. “It has to be balanced with other human rights.” Schmidt may have said what’s what in Denmark, but that’s not the way things are in America, where free speech is guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And that includes unpopular speech.
What we know and are learning shows that the mindset of Twitter’s boss and employees was one of cheating, censoring speech by deplatforming, suspending users, and other techniques to achieve its liberal/progressive goals, including winning the election of 2020.
“Deplatforming is certainly an effective tool when it comes to countering terrorist and like-minded extremist groups online. But the fact that this tactic is being used against individuals and organizations that do not fit these categories is a terrifying abuse of power,” reported The Washington Times.
“Such a tactic has proven to be just as effective in manipulating mainstream electoral campaigns. One of the most egregious examples of this was when Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post over the paper’s exposés about Hunter Biden’s emails and corruption. In other words, social media platforms baselessly characterized the Post’s investigative journalism as ‘misinformation’ and blocked it.”
The Times story goes on to say that a news report from the Media Research Center shows that some voters “would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they knew at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets.”
Twitter was and is a platform owned by a private company. According to webopedia.com, “Social media platforms are interactive digital channels that focus on the creation and sharing of thoughts, ideas, and information through virtual networks. These platforms enable users to take part in social networking by creating content, sharing their thoughts, commenting on other user content, and reposting it.”
Twitter and Facebook can control what is on their platform. They can prohibit truly dangerous language. But to take a political side, without a public statement to that effect, and then secretly censor the other political side is dishonest, and un-American.
Elon Musk has a good start to cleaning up Twitter, and hopefully will keep it politically neutral. Maybe Facebook will clean up, too.
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