Trump is an extremely high profile rule breaker, and he has been given a lot of slack on twitter up until very recently. Making disparaging remarks about Trump voters is extremely unprofessional but it isn't evidence of selectively targeting conservatives on the platform. The idea that these companies "actively silence the right" is simply false; there is an endless sea of conservatives all over twitter and every other big platform. Ironically, on the platforms that conservatives control liberals aren't present or welcomed and they are openly ridiculed with extreme ferocity and have been for decades.
Twitter censors liberals and leftists all the time. They just don't raise aa big of a stink about it as conservatives. Part of it is working the refs and part is the large increase in racist and conspiracy theories among right wing people in recent times.
I'm not a big Twitter user but am often bombarded with right wing content on other sites like Reddit and Youtube no matter how often I try to tell the site/train the algorithm that it's not content I'm interested in seeing whatsoever, the idea that conservatives are being silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing their content is frankly ridiculous
There is absolutely some truth that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives - the truth is that the mainstream "conservative" position in the US happens to involve behavior that runs afoul of neutral content norms (don't threaten people with violence, don't call them racial slurs, don't dox people, etc.) disproportionately more often than people with other political beliefs. Sure, there are some people of other political persuasions who are "essentially" calling for violence, but there's a large gap between "as MLK said, a riot is the language of the unheard, so I can't condemn it" (and even that is hardly a universal position among non-conservatives) and "I, the actual commander-in-chief of an actual military, am telling that military to use violence against my own people" + "We all think this is good and proper, do it."
This is an uncomfortable, rude, politically incorrect truth - but we're not going to have a productive discussion about "silencing conservatives" if we can't admit it.
It is absolutely possible to advocate for the political positions of conservatives (looking through the 2016 GOP platform, for instance - limited government, federalism, avoiding trade deficits, repeal of Dodd-Frank, auditing the Fed, right-to-work, opposition to abortion, support for the electoral college, removing gray wolves from the endangered species list, etc., etc.) without behavior that runs afoul of the norms. If there's a case where Twitter suspends someone for opposing Dodd-Frank, then we should absolutely criticize Twitter. (And I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had about where the line is about criticizing the government's pandemic response vs. spreading misinformation, for instance.) But saying "Conservatives really like to advocate for shooting people without due process, Twitter doesn't permit the advocacy of shooting people without due process, therefore Twitter is biased against conservatives" is more of a statement about conservatives than about Twitter.
> There is massive resentment from people on the right who think the Twitter rules unfairly elevated some political opinions as good/correct/acceptable while treating others as unacceptable.
Would it surprise you to find out that this resentment is in fact, conveniently manufactured, politically useful outrage? Because it's simply not true on its face, and the only thing we need to know to understand this is to see that it took Trump launching a coup to be banned on the platform. He violated the TOS every day, and he was allowed to spread his message to his millions of followers by Twitter. You want to talk about unfairly elevating political opinions? Trump used the platform to violate citizens' first amendment rights, and we had to take him to court to get those rights back. Twitter didn't do shit to protect us from him.
But it's not just Trump. It's right wing political opinions writ large. Far and away from sinking right wing conservative voices, Twitter research found they actually amplify right wing voices in every one of their top 6 countries except Germany [1]. Yes, that includes the US.
Is your mind blown? Have you heard of this once? I bet all you've heard from Musk and right wing politicians is that Twitter is going hard on conservatives and deplatforming them. Blocking their messages. Being unfair to conservatives and right wing opinions.
Yet what has actually happened? Twitter was actually deferential to conservative voices! It boosted conservatives and right wing voices at the expense of liberals. How did this happen? This is conservative messaging 101: complain about bias loudly enough and the other side will go so far out of their way to seem unbiased, they will be biased in the other direction. Conservatives managed to complain so loud about Twitter being biased against them that you not only believe it, but reality is actually completely the opposite.
Yeah, they fact check or block obvious parody tweets that are pro-conservative like the "racist baby" parody tweet a few weeks ago. They arbitrarily inject warning labels on Trump tweets while ignoring anti-cop tweets calling for violence and destruction (not just this year, going back to 2016 even [1]).
The head of Twitter's Head of Site Integrity had this to say about red states:
“I’m just saying,” he tweeted in November 2016, “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
It doesn't just lean left. It actively hates, demeans and silences the right.
I’m not familiar with the lightness with which Twitter bans conservatives. Could you provide an example close to the example you gave? Or will any example be even more bigoted?
Just not true at all, there's tons of conservatives on twitter not having any problem at all. - Trump's problem, and that of his allies, is that they talk bullshit all the time. It is lies, half-truths, threats of violence and insults all day every day.
"Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse"
That's just not true - Donald Trump hasn't been "casually censored", neither have any of the GOP representatives who have Twitter accounts.
If you say abhorrent stuff, then yes, their platform, and they can say "you're not welcome here", but just look at the cesspit of comments on the recent "gate" hashtag and you'll see there are MANY right of center (some cases miles right of center) voices on there.
What I've seen is that typically a banned conservative will do something like target someone without the resources to defend themselves (for example, Alex Jones calling children that are victims of a mass shooting "crisis actors"), whereas hordes of liberal citizens voicing their distaste of Trump is just How It Be To Be President.
I would love to see evidence contrary. I report violent comments no matter the target and Twitter is good about sending a message back about action taken, and I've yet to notice a trend.
Twitter or most other social media platforms do not have a problem with conservatives (or "the opposite political party" as you put it). Was deplatforming anyone but blatant white supremacists even a conversation before 2017?
Most mainstream conservatives operate accounts on Twitter without an issue and a fair amount of libertarian and conservative-identifying individuals have used Twitter for years without being banned for their views. Framing this as a problem with political viewpoints doesn't do much besides serve a false narrative.
If you read Twitter's rationale for banning Donald Trump it didn't have much to do with his viewpoint. It had everything to do with implying and promoting violent acts. Putting deplatforming in terms of "censorship of political views" is a seductive argument but it falls apart when you recognize the content of those viewpoints have less to do with a matter of policy opinion and more to do with an unhinged ideology based around waging civil war against your opponents.
This is just an expression of the larger, ongoing culture war. There may be some truth to the claims that conservatives are being censored more often, but I don't really believe that this is the primary thing driving them away. They view Twitter as a left institution, and view its users as primarily leaning left. As the American culture war continues to escalate, more institutions (and companies, and websites) get dragged into it. The entity in question "must" be either right or left. Even COVID-19 has taken a very partisan bent in this climate.
I follow primarily esports players, a handful of folks like Patio11 and Paul Graham, some constitutional conservatives, a handful of John Locke style liberals, a few gun people (Colion Noir, and others) and that's it.
Despite this, I am rarely shown anything conservative on Twitter. If the algo gods have decided I'm extreme left, then they are broken beyond repair. It seems more likely to me that Twitter simply de-prioritizes conservative media.
I agree, but conservatives have been complaining about the phenomenon of shadow-banning on the platform for years, and this was pretty much confirmed after the Twitter hack last year. To allow conservative views but reduce their visibility is just a more subtle form of censorship, reflecting a left-leaning bias. I don't think Twitter or Facebook would even bother denying any of this at this point.
Well, objectively the Twitter is biased against conservatives. See a talk on Joe Rogan with Tim Pool and CEO of Twitter. So, the most obvious example is, if you are conservative and assert that there are only two sexes and happen to refer to someone according to your stance - you can get banned for misgendering.
I hear about the supposed selective targeting of conservatives all the time, but don't really see any evidence for it. Every well known conservative has a huge following on Twitter or YouTube. People sometimes point to Alex Jones as an example but he was clearly banned for smearing the parents of murdered Newtown children. I'm not saying that big tech doesn't lean left, but I don't see evidence that they target people just for being conservative.
The interesting aspect is that conservatives think that it is very likely that social media sites censor their views at a rate double that of liberals. Even if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter, it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from other users of social media sites.
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