While Democrats cry about “Russian bots and trolls” manipulating Twitter by tweeting out certain hashtags hoping to boost them into the trending module or mass-“liking” certain tweets to give the appearance that the message is resonating with more people than it actually is; the effect they have is often minimal. One of Twitter’s executives, Nick Pickles, testified at a Congressional hearing that just 49 Russian Twitter accounts were involved in trying to artificially boost support for Brexit [the proposal for England to leave the European Union] and those collective tweets had only been liked 637 times and retweeted just 461 times.655
While troll farms run by foreign governments or domestic political activist organizations should be a concern, Twitter and the other major tech companies have safeguards in place to detect and prevent most of this inauthentic activity from disrupting the platforms. The biggest threat in this modern information war comes from the tech companies themselves, since they hold the power over what billions of people see and hear, and with small changes to their algorithms can hide or amplify certain issues or events in order to further their own political agendas.
Massive Liberal Bias
After years of avoiding the issue, Twitter’s CEO finally admitted “It’s no secret that we are largely left leaning, and we all have biases. That includes me, our board, and our company.”656 They are so liberal in fact, that Jack Dorsey actually apologized for eating at Chick-Fil-A after he tweeted that he just used Square’s Cash App to buy lunch there, which triggered a flood of angry responses from many of his followers because Chick-Fil-A’s CEO doesn’t support gay “marriage.”657
Jack Dorsey has been photographed hanging out with Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson and the two even did a joint interview together in 2016 at the popular Recode Code Conference.658 Twitter also hired a woman named Dr. Patricia Rossini to examine “civil discourse” on the platform because everyone knows Twitter has become a nasty place, but an examination of Dr. Rossini’s past tweets reveal that she believes the basic tenets of the Republican Party are hate, racism, and homophobia.659
The leader of Twitter’s new “task force” on “uncivil discourse,” Rebekah Tromble, thinks that President Trump is a Nazi and has “quintupled down on his commitment to white nationalists.”660 Democrat Congressman Ted Lieu from California tweeted out a photo of himself and the party’s new social media star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at what he described as a “training session” on Twitter, noting representatives from the company were in attendance helping Democrats learn to be more social media savvy.661
Twitter also allows people to post pornography, and is an easy place for children to access it.662 Most porn stars have Twitter accounts which contain a steady stream of hard core pornographic videos and pictures with no effective safeguards to prevent kids from following such accounts and seeing their explicit posts.
What’s Trending
Twitter’s “Trending” list is supposed to be the top ten list of the most tweeted about topics or hashtags of the moment, but most users are unaware of the manual curation that is often involved. Topics are regularly artificially boosted to give the appearance that they are “popular” while others are suppressed to prevent people from looking into them further.
Oftentimes if something trends on Twitter, it then starts making national headlines. Whether it’s a local issue in a small town that, for whatever reason, goes viral and starts trending, or something stupid that a celebrity said or did—if it trends, it then makes headlines.
For over six consecutive months starting in the Spring of 2019 every single Sunday pro-LGBT hashtags like #LGBTangels, #LGBTQsquad, #unitedLGBT, #rainbowLGBT, LGBTQoftwitter, etc. would be on the top ten trending list.663 The hashtag campaigns are organized by liberal groups likely in coordination with Twitter which then inserts them into the trending list to regularly expose people to selfies of teenagers “coming out” online, in attempt to normalize homosexuality and gender bending.
In his testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, Twitter’s lawyer admitted the company had censored almost half of all tweets using the hashtag #DNCLeak when Wikileaks first published the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, despite their systems only linking 2% of the tweets to supposed Russian troll farms.664
When you click on the Search tab (the magnifying glass icon) on a mobile device, which you need to do in order to get see the Trending list, first you are taken to a page that contains a featured story (they call a “Moment”) which is always chosen by Twitter that supposedly has something to do with what’s trending, but always attempts to frame the issue in a certain light. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jack Dorsey admitted, “We can amplify the counter-narrative [to what Trump is saying]. We do have a curation team that looks to find balance. A lot of times when our president tweets, a “Moment” occurs, and we show completely different perspectives.”665
Shadow Banning
In July 2018 conservative Twitter users started noticing that when they looked up top Republican members of Congress in the Twitter Search bar that many of their names were mysteriously missing. Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, John Ratcliffe, Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, and many others (including myself) were all shadow banned from the Search box to make it more difficult for people looking us up to find our accounts.
Surprisingly the very liberal Vice News did an investigation into the shadow banning “allegations” and admitted, “Twitter is limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans in search results — a technique known as ‘shadow banning’ — in what it says is a side effect of its attempts to improve the quality of discourse on the platform.”666
The article went on to detail that prominent Republican members of Congress “no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter” and that, “It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and it’s the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility.”667
Vice also pointed out that the shadow banning was not implemented on any Democrats they looked up, noting “Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way, according to a VICE News review. [Ronna] McDaniel’s counterpart, 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.”668
Many conservatives began noticing this anomaly but it wasn’t until Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz called out the shadow banning that it began making headlines.669 Then President Trump tweeted about it and the issue couldn’t be ignored.670 A reporter for Axios then tweeted that he, “Must admit that when some [Republican] sources have complained about this to me I mocked them to their face as conspiracy theorists. This Vice article makes me rethink that, and response from Twitter is inadequate.”671