FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, currently the most hated man in America by people who don’t know how the internet works, recently lashed out against Twitter for their throttling of right-leaning voices and their unappreciativeness of free speech.
If you’ve never heard of Twitter “throttling” certain users, then here’s the breakdown: If you don’t subscribe to the Californian leftist ideology of pro-social justice cheerleading and Democrat support, then your tweets may be hidden away from a good chunk of the world.
When people on the right, Trump supporters, anti-social justice advocates, etc, began seeing their engagement tank, the idea that people were being throttled gained a lot of steam. Twitter’s “Update on Safety” earlier this year didn’t do too much to make people any less convinced.
As you can read below, these new safety measures taken by Twitter in order to protect people from “low-quality” content include manipulating search results, and collapsing replies if it may seem like these replies would be “potentially sensitive.”
Twitter has been vague about what could be considered “sensitive.” On top of the fact that, a tweet or user doesn’t have to be guilty of being sensitive, just “potentially” so. However, we got a pretty good idea of what Twitter considers a line when they removed an ad by Tennessee congressional candidate, Marsha Blackburn. A line said in Blackburn’s video against Planned Parenthood “had been deemed an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction,” according to Twitter.
The line? “I’m 100-percent pro-life. I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts, thank God.”
That’s it. That’s all it took for Twitter to censor Blackburn.
According to Life News, pro-life groups have reported being censored by Twitter more often than not.
Pai used this as an example of how Twitter is guilty of partisan censorship when he spoke out against the social media site, according to Life News.
“The company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users. Providers like Twitter routinely block or discriminate against conduct they don’t like,” said Pai.
“Now look,” Pai added. “I love Twitter, and I use it all the time. But let’s not kid ourselves. When it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint, and it uses that viewpoint to discriminate.”
Keep in mind, Twitter is a private company, and if they wish to censor conservatives, pro-life groups, and anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the double-plus-goodness of the left’s ideological bubble then that’s their choice. However, it should be noted that Twitter is a major platform where ideas are exchanged by all sorts of people. Throttling those who did nothing wrong but disagree with you isn’t just bad business, it’s cowardly and ethically questionable.
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