By CANDY STALLWORTH
It’s no secret that Facebook has deliberately suppressed conservative content from reaching its users, exemplified by the well-documented case of pro-Trump vloggers Diamond and Silk. But now it appears that Twitter may also be blocking certain users, who happen to be pro-Trump Republicans.
Twitter has been accused of “shadow banning” some users, such as Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Congressman Devin Nunes (R-California), Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and other Republican Congressman, as well as Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesperson, Andrew Surabian. Shadow banning is when a user’s content is blocked from being seen by other users, but he/she is not aware of it and thinks the content is available to others. In the cases of these Republicans’ accounts, when a user searches their name, it does not come up in the auto-population of search terms, thus making it more difficult to find. Shadow banning is typically used for hate groups, such as pro-Nazis or racists. It is very troubling to think that this strategy is being used against Republicans, simply because the Twitter powers that be do not agree with their viewpoints.
As McDaniel noted in her tweet, “The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American. Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on.” Trump Jr. similarly called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to end the nefarious free-speech-crushing practice with this tweet: “@Jack it’s time for you to #StopTheBias against conservatives and Trump supporters and fix this once and for all.”
Twitter reported that this issue was a glitch in its algorithms and now it has been fixed. Product lead Kayvon Beykpour tweeted this: “To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets.”
Will Twitter go the way of Facebook and lose all credibility because of its blatant bias against conservatives? Or will it do the right thing and allow conservative viewpoints to be accessed by anyone who is searching for them? Time will tell, but conservatives should not, and will not, allow their First Amendment rights to be squashed on social media, or any platform.
Candy Stallworth, an Empire State News staff writer, whipped her way through a doctoral education at the finest of American higher ed institutions, noting how unoriginal, inept, and annoying many of the schools’ professors were in their robotic attempts to maintain a politically correct narrative. BTW: she hates words like “narrative”, “optics”, and “gaffe.” Other than that, her turn-offs include non-masculine men, women who hate men, men who hate men, phonies, disloyal people, and overflowing garbage cans. She likes New England clam chowder better than Manhattan clam chowder, but prefers Manhattan to New England.
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