Twitter shares fell 4 percent in afternoon trading Thursday after President Donald Trump said in a tweet the company was limiting visibility of prominent Republicans and added that he was going to look into the matter. If it wasn’t for President Trump’s use of Twitter, the company would still be in the hole it was in before the election.
This followed a report by Vice magazine which said prominent Republicans including Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel were not showing up in the drop-down menu of Twitter’s search function.
It is true they can be found eventually through a general search.
In his tweet, Trump accused Twitter of “shadow banning,” or limiting visibility, of some Republicans and said it was “discriminatory and illegal.”
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Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2018
JUST A BUG
The company said that some accounts weren’t automatically populating due to a bug they are working to fix. They claim they do not make judgments based on political views – but they do on behavior. More on that in a moment.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been accused of having a bias against conservatives before. Diamond and Silk, the Trump-supporting video personalities, had their page removed by Facebook earlier this year, leading to outcries of censorship, including from several congressmen.
During his Congressional hearing in April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said this was an “enforcement error” and the page would be reinstated.
Most of their army of fact-checkers, at least on Facebook and YouTube are left-wingers. George Soros funds them in part. Their job is to hunt for ‘fake news’ but they only seem to find fake news on the right-wing sites.
A BUG THAT AFFECTS PEOPLE ‘NOT CONTRIBUTING TO THE HEALTHY CONVERSATION’
The Vice report found that Twitter is censoring top pro-Trump lawmakers, including the RNC chair and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesperson.
They also found that Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.
“The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American,” McDaniel told VICE News in a statement. “Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on.”
This next part is interesting.
Twitter told Vice, “I’d emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”
Twitter directed VICE News to a May 15 blog post that explained the company’s new approach to combating “troll-like behaviors.” After making changes to its platform, the company said that “[t]he result is that people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search.”
What does that tell you?
Let’s not forget what reporter James O’Keefe uncovered.
We caught a Twitter software engineer RED HANDED when he admitted that Twitter #ShadowBans to our undercover journalist. Twitter will never admit it: “it’s a lot of bad press if, like, people figure out that you’re like shadow banning them. It’s like, unethical in some way.” pic.twitter.com/MmBGKohWLj
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) July 26, 2018
Mark Zuckerberg lost $15 billion as Facebook’s stock fell. Tech Crunch reported Wednesday that Facebook lost $123 billion in value. They lost more than any company in U.S. market history.
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