All the Orwellian euphemisms and cheery titles will no longer disguise Twitter’s raw censorship. … Twitter executives showed how censorship can become an insatiable appetite for speech controls. Sitting in the San Francisco headquarters, the “Trust” officials found an array of conservative views unworthy to be heard. –GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, Dec. 9, 2022
Elon Musk’s revelation of the “Twitter files” that expose Twitter’s raw political censorship of conservatives in support of the Biden and the Democrats has been greeted with a collective yawn by the Left and its agents. The “Legacy” news media have been almost completely silent about the scandal (The Sound of Silence), largely because they have transparently been engaged in the same kind of censorship and are not eager to be held responsible for their collusion with what remains of the Democrat Party. When they mention the scandal at all the strategy is to label it as a “nothingburger”. Nothing to see here!
Liberal Jessica Tarlov illustrated this strategy in a revealing exchange with conservative Judge Jeanine on Fox News’ The Five. Tarlov begins by employing a non sequitur fallacy to absolve Dorsey’s Twitter of any wrongdoing.
Tarlov: “It is relevant and I know that it is funny to say that it is Twitter policy but it was Twitter policy. This policy came out in 2018 and they talked openly about it and even briefed reports on this to the point that Slate …
Judge Jeanine: [W]hat are you talking about? Dorsey lied. He went before congress and lied under oath.
Tarlov: That’s not true. No no no no no! What Dorsey did was say there wasn’t anything in excess of the policy on the books, what Slate called “Twitter purgatory”. Bari Weiss gives us no details as to why Charlie Kirk or Dan Bongino were de-amplified.
It is fair to ask for more details on why Kirk or Bongino were de-amplified but Musk has promised to release everything. Tarlov generally tries to promote the impression that she wants to defend the liberal position with reasonable arguments (not another Don Lemon or Joy Reid). However, her argument in this case is pure sophistry and deflection.
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Judge Jeanine points out that Dorsey went before congress and, in response to the question whether Twitter “shadow-banned” replied, under oath, “No.” Tarlov’s response, that this is irrelevant because Twitter had previously announced its policy in public is both false and irrelevant.
It is false, first, because Twitter never publicly announced that it produced “blacklists” of political views, mostly conservatives, that were to be de-emphasized. We thought “liberals” were against McCarthyesque backlisting! Guess not! It is false, second, because Twitter never announced that they produced a policy to justify banning Trump alone! It is false, third, because Twitter never announced that it banned Trump after a request from his political opponent Michelle Obama! It is false, fourth, because Twitter never announced publicly that it banned Trump, not for what he actually said, but, literally absurdly, because of “how he was being interpreted.” These are the policies of children, not serious people.
Tarlov’s response is irrelevant because, even if one grants her claim, that would only mean that Twitter had publicly announced that they shadow-ban disfavored views, or, according to Tarlov’s euphemism for “shadow-banning,” put disfavored political views in “Twitter purgatory”, not that they do not “shadow-ban” at all.
There is a reason why the Left must refuse to face the facts exposed in the Twitter files. For to do so would be to admit that their central narratives, that they are trying to “save our democracy” from the evil Donald Trump and that they are against “election fraud,” are the precise opposite of the truth. As Jonathan Turley points out, one may argue whether Twitter’s censorship campaign in the months leading up to the 2020 election broke laws, but there is no doubt that it is cheating! In fact, the Left, from the 1960’s student radicals to the present day, have been engaged in a constant effort to undermine American democracy.
Turley also points out that Democrat politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden have even publicly called for corporate proxies to censor political speech for the Democrats because it is illegal for the government to do it,
What’s striking is [that] leading Democrats have been open about precisely this type of corporate manipulation of political speech on social media. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called upon these companies to use enlightened algorithms to protect users from their own bad reading choices.
Even President Joe Biden called for such regulation of speech and discussions by wise editors. Without such censorship and manipulation, Biden asked, “How do people know the truth?”
Welcome to the Government/Party controlled “news,” American Pravda! Here is a newsflash for Jessica. The fact that Democrats publicly call for cheating does not mean it’s not cheating. Do Democrats remember the first amendment to the Constitution? Maybe not!
It may be useful to recall just how little it takes for Democrats to claim, often hysterically, that there has been election cheating. Recall that in 2000 Democrat “election deniers” claimed that Al Gore won the election and demanded a federal investigation into charges of voter suppression.
Although an extended discussion of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, part of the federal government, report on the 2000 election would be illuminating, consider just two examples from it. One resident, apparently a “person of color,” thought it was unusual that state trooper vehicles were parked “within sight” of some polling places! This is voter suppression? Did anyone claim that any police officer tried to stop any person of color voting? None!
In the second case, some “persons of color” complained that “The Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) established a checkpoint on Oak Ridge Road between the hours of 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. … Approximately 150 vehicles were stopped. According to FHP records, of the 16 citizens who received notices of faulty equipment, six (37 percent) were people of color. But that is just about the exact percent of “persons of color” one would expect given their percent of the population at the time!
We literally needed a federal investigation for these two kinds of “complaints”?
If there is any doubt that what Dorsey’s Twitter did is cheating just wait until conservatives gain control of the most powerful news organizations and starts censoring the Democrat’s views. Let them do to the Democrats one tenth of what they did to Trump. In fact, let them do to Democrats one hundredth of what they did to Trump and get ready to sit back and enjoy the frothing mouth infantile hysteria from the same comedians that are now playing word-games to defend Dorsey’s Twitter anti-American censorship regime.
The Left is, comically, already attacking Musk and worrying that he might censor their views. Excuse me! Democrats are now claiming that Twitter’s censorship of conservatives is a “nothingburger” but they are simultaneously squealing that Musk’s Twitter might censor their views? They had no problem when Dorsey’s Twitter censored true stories, like that of the Hunter Biden laptop, crucially important to conservatives. Elon’s plans to restore freedom of speech to Twitter threatens freedom of speech? Thank you, Mr. Orwell, for the “newspeak”. Oh, by the way, Elon supported Democrat Andrew Tang for president in 2020. Maybe he just believes in America and the Constitution!
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