Twitter's Tweets About Election in Uganda May Be The Funniest Thing You'll Hear Today

You have to hand it to Twitter.

No one can ever say they aren’t huge hypocrites.

But this week, they really shot themselves in the foot.

There was a lot of Big Tech collusion this week, with Twitter booting President Donald Trump, people on the right getting booted off the site, virtually everyone on the right losing a good chunk of their followers (reducing their reach) and Parler almost getting destroyed by Apple, Google and Amazon.

Their “explanation” for everyone on the right losing a percentage of their followers, some losing tens of thousands of followers, initially was that they were preventing spam accounts, so those wouldn’t be included in follower totals. Now today, there’s a new excuse. Now they are admitting that they whacked 70,000 Q Anon people for spreading conspiracies on the site. So which is it? Sure sounds a little funny when the answer keeps changing.

But beyond that ordinary prevention of spam wouldn’t have resulted in people losing thousands of followers within an hour. And that wouldn’t only pertain to folks on the right. Since virtually everyone on the right lost followers, some people losing tens of thousands of followers, the 70,000 Q Anon response seems a little dubious as well, it seemed to involved far bigger number of people.

So while their CEO Jack Dorsey celebrated the killing of Parler, their competition, all the purging led to their own stock taking a big nosedive.

But today, after everything, what they posted about the Ugandan election really takes the cake, hey folks, they condemn internet shutdowns! I have to say I actually laughed at the utter audacity of this.

Ahead of the Ugandan election, we're hearing reports that Internet service providers are being ordered to block social media and messaging apps.

We strongly condemn internet shutdowns – they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet.

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) January 12, 2021

Earlier this week, in close coordination with our peers, we suspended a number of accounts targeting the election in Uganda.

If we can attribute any of this activity to state-backed actors, we will disclose to our archive of information operations:https://t.co/GB71n4avwm

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) January 12, 2021

Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.#UgandaDecides2021 #KeepItOn https://t.co/Q2SJfsFUiD

— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) January 12, 2021

Aren’t these the same folks who shut down the NY Post story about Hunter Biden in October then suspended the NY Post account? What happened to that freedom of expression?

Needless to say, folks on the right had a few things to say.

You banned the sharing of accurate journalism that was negative for your preferred candidate during the 2020 election, an egregious tampering with freedom of expression and the public conversation in the midst of an important democratic process.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 12, 2021