Does Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey – aka @Jack – have a death wish for the company he created? After “fact-checking” presidential tweets on the problems with mail-in ballots – and getting their own “facts” wrong – Twitter responded with pure left-wing politics after the President signed an executive order that, in the words of Mediaite, “institutes additional scrutiny on social networking sites and their policing of content, including false claims and political messaging.”
This EO is a reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law. #Section230 protects American innovation and freedom of expression, and it’s underpinned by democratic values. Attempts to unilaterally erode it threaten the future of online speech and Internet freedoms.
— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) May 29, 2020
As if that weren’t enough? When the President tweeted out his determination not to let the violence in Minneapolis take lives, pointing out that “looting leads to shooting” ? Twitter censored that Trump tweet, claiming it “glorified violence.” Hello? maybe Twitter missed this news out of Minneapolis, as reported by The New York Post. The headline:
George Floyd protests turn deadly after man shot outside pawnshop
The Post report says this:
“A man was shot dead outside a Minneapolis pawnshop Wednesday night as violent protests over the death of George Floyd rattled the city, authorities said.
Minneapolis cops are investigating reports that the victim was a looter shot dead by an owner of the business, police department spokesman John Elder said at a press briefing early Thursday.”
Got that? Exactly as the President predicted, the looting in Minneapolis led to the shooting and killing of a man suspected of looting. That Twitter turned the President’s common-sense warning – which has now been proven true – on its head to portray the President as somehow “glorifying violence” is the height of not merely censorship but a complete, deliberate misrepresentation.
Not to mention that to call an Executive Order from this President or any other “reactionary and politicized” is, yes indeed, a political opinion. Left-leaning to be sure, but opinion regardless.
The right way out of this morass is for @Jack to return Twitter to what it was supposed to be from the beginning – a neutral forum where those who post put up whatever and leave it to those who read or follow to make up their own minds without editorial comment from Twitter itself.
Strangely, this is what happens if the person in question who is doing the posting is a lefty. Over there at The New York Post the paper’s op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari has pointed out that when liberals post tweets with bad or false information – the Twitter police fall silent. Ahmari points this one out, which is one of my personal favorites:
“Or how about a 2019 tweet from actress Nancy Lee Grahn that featured photos of migrant children at a border detention center and railed against Team Trump for allegedly torturing kids? As Internet sleuths pointed out, Grahn’s photo was cropped to remove the timestamp: 2015. It garnered nearly 50,000 retweets anyway.”
Got it? Grahn posted a photo of migrant kids in cages – and the photo was cropped to keep viewers from knowing the photo was taken in 2015 – when the Obama administration was doing this.
Ahmari also noted this:
“In January 2019, former President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, joined thousands of other members of the blue-check Twitterati in touting a made-for-Twitter BuzzFeed News exposé. ‘This is big,’ McFaul wrote, ‘President Trump directed his attorney to lie to Congress.’
Yes, big — and false: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team was quick to characterize the story as inaccurate, and its report made clear that the president had done no such thing. No Twitter ‘fact-check’ hazard for McFaul, et al., though.”
Over at NewsBusters, the NB staff headlined this:
33 Examples of Twitter’s Anti-Conservative Bias
NB began by saying this:
“President Donald Trump is right that social media companies have been targeting conservatives. Twitter, in particular, has been engaging in a relentless attack on the American political process by censoring conservatives.”
One example after another of this left-wing bias at Twitter was provided. Including:
“Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign video
It should come as no surprise that the official campaign Twitter account for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was suspended for sharing a video of the violent threats being made against the senator. Multiple people on Twitter were also suspended for sharing that video, including the Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra. Twitter eventually overturned this decision but only after numerous complaints.”
And then this:
“113 prominent conservatives censored between 2015-2019
Between 2015 and 2019, there have been at least 113 different cases of conservative, pro-Trump or anti-establishment figures on Twitter being punished for expressing their views, many of them well-known in their fields. Notable people have been suspended, banned, blocked from advertising, shadowbanned, and censored. While Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified in Congress in September that “Twitter does not use political ideology to make decisions,” the evidence points in the opposite direction.”
Catch that? There is @Jack actually telling Congress in his testimony that “Twitter does not use political ideology to make decisions” – when in fact that is exactly what Twitter is doing right now in posting “fact checks” that are themselves false or censoring him outright with a deliberate misrepresentation of his tweets.
All of which is to say, it is precisely this censorship and harassment of conservatives, the President included, that has now brought forth the entirely foreseeable Executive Order from the President.
You brought it on yourself, Twitter and @Jack.
And enough….is enough.
