Twitter has a lot of faults, but the most destructive one is their bias. They operate as a propaganda arm of the Woke Left. They claim otherwise but their actions constantly betray them with blatant discrimination.
Former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted they have a problem.
“We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning,” he added. “And I think it’s important to articulate our own bias and to share it with people so that people understand us. But we need to remove our bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement.”
This manifests itself in a number of ways including suppression of topics they dislike, promotion of topics they do like and a Thought Police mentality toward what they allow to be said.
The most recent victim is Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green who received a permanent ban for sharing and commenting on CDC vaccine data. She ran afoul of the diktat that none shall question the safety of the brand new & barely tested vaccines.
“Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, Kamala and Ilhan can bail out Black Lives Matter terrorists on Twitter, CNN and the rest of the Democrat Propaganda Media can spread Russia collusion lies, and just yesterday the Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani, but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS statistics,” Greene said. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.”
If a sitting US Congresswoman is not allowed to question policies which affect her constituents and all Americans, we have a problem. The usual answer from the usual suspects is “Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want”. And in the vast majority of cases, I would agree.
But Twitter is not a normal company, it is the single most influential social media platform for media, thought leaders, and political leaders. It operates as a monopoly in that space. It would be fair to say it is a commodity vital to communication with the public for any leader in this country.
Twitter’s bias leads to unbalanced application of its own convoluted rules. No one is ever really sure what you can or cannot say, but it is readily apparent if you say things that violate woke orthodoxy, you are much more likely to be sanctioned.
They banned President Trump and now Rep. Greene and in the past they used algorithms to limit the reach of a number of other Republican politicians. But the same doesn’t happen to leaders on the Left, and that is not surprising since they are in near lockstep with the censors at Twitter.
The question is what should or even can be done about this. It’s easy to say just let the free market sort it out. But this leaves a massive disparity in what information Americans on this platform receive. And it pushes the accepted reality further and further Left.
Twitter claims its rules and implementation of them are neutral. If you accept that a woke worldview should be our reality, then that is ostensibly true. They choose what are accepted beliefs, have them validated by fact-checkers who share their ideology and then have decisions on who is a violator adjudicated by their own true believers.
How could that possibly end up producing a biased outcome?
A large part of the problem is around what are facts vs. opinions and who is the decider on that. If all of the deciders share one belief system and that belief system considers disagreement with the established orthodoxy akin to heresy, then you can either accept their version of reality or face the punishment.
Whether or not having a small group of technocrats deciding what is feal and what is healthy for us to talk about is a new and unhealthy development for free speech. But when those zealots have control of most of the public information space, we end up with an increasingly limited ability to argue about what is good or bad for this country. And that is bad if you believe in political and cultural freedom.
It is even more concerning when the social media platforms conspire with their like-minded fellow travelers in government. This is leading to the government essentially outsourcing censorship of ideas they dislike to the tech tyrants. We saw this espoused as official US policy by the Biden White House in the Domestic Extremism plan.
They start with free speech and propose to partner with the tech tyrants to further marginalize or eliminate ideas they dislike or disagree with:
“These efforts speak to a broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
Translation: “Your ideas are dangerous to our ability to aggregate state power, and we are going to shut you down.”
This is not only horrifying to contemplate but almost certainly a violation of the rule against government using private companies to do things it is forbidden to do itself. But it also shows how far down the road to using state and private power to shut down dissent we have already gone.
Changing this is properly difficult in a Constitutional framework and capitalist system that offers tremendous freedom to private entities like Twitter. Taking action to limit their ability to run their company requires great provocation, but they have provoked greatly and action is needed.
Twitter opens itself to a number of actions if it fails to enact remedies to these problems.
- As a publicly-traded company, Twitter could be subject to actions from its stockholders if it inaccurately characterizes the current state of viewpoint discrimination.
- Twitter’s Terms of Service claim that do not discriminate based on ideology. If they can be shown to do so, they can be liable to lawsuits based on consumer protection laws.
- Government scrutiny could be applied by a number of agencies:
- Federal Election Commission– By providing an advantage to one party in election communications, Twitter makes in-kind contribution. This could extend beyond individual races if the advantage is found to have been systemic in nature.
- Securities and Exchange Commission– Public statements claiming a content neutral platform, while operating one that is biased in outcome, could be deemed violations.
- Federal Trade Commission– Due to the monopoly-like nature of Twitter in the marketplace and the need for its services by almost all public entities, Twitter could face anti-trust scrutiny.
- Federal Communications Commission– Twitter could be reclassified as a publisher to remove exemption as an internet provider under the Communications Decency Act.
The best route forward would be for Twitter to decide that its self-appointed role as arbiters of what is “healthy conversation” is misguided. We have seen that it leads to authoritarian abuses of people’s ability to dissent from the dictated reality. If Twitter want to do so, there can expand the many avenues already existing for people to self-select what they want or do not want to be exposed to. If Twitter decides to hold firm or press forward with a role as private Thought Police, then we must push back and break their monopoly on free discussion of ideas.