This literally does not happen, and is entirely made up in a form of projection. In fact, Twitter has been found to be biased towards recommending right-wing sources. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
That only makes sense if Twitter is predominantly anti-right wing, and people who are anti-rightwing get outraged by rightwing nonsense more than leftwing nonsense, and thus rage-click, share and comment on that content more.
Science: There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aay9344
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trade-offs between reducing misinformation and politically- balanced enforcement on social media.
I.e. Analyzing Twitter suspensions shows that users’ sharing of links to misinformation sites was as predictive of being suspended as was the users’ political orientation. "Conservative" accounts share more misinformation, and violate with greater frequency policy rules.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And next, you might in response link this article:
https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
A study that although argues twitter has a bias, readily admits in it's data sampling that the banned/suspended accounts violate terms and conditions at a mich higher rate.
Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.
Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lastly:
" We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites – as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds – than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation."
https://www.benton.org/headlines/twitter-biased-against-cons...
------------------------------------------------------------
“We were surprised,” says González-Bailón, an associate professor in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Previous work has documented that Twitter users tend to have a liberal bias. But we found that across the board, the news most often shared has a right-leaning bias. This increases the visibility of conservative voices, even in the context of protest mobilizations with liberal goals.”
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives...
Research paper: The advantage of the right in social media news sharing
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac137/66516...
The key flaw here was "misinformation" at that time included what is now considered "fact" about COVID Policies, and "science", including mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, Lab leak theory, and a whole host of other things that were "misinformation" in 2020 but not in 2022. that is the entire problem with the "misinformation" narrative
Science after all is not "experts telling us what to think" but instead is in reality it the act of continual questioning of established narrative
Shutting down debate for "misinformation" is itself anti-science
"Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended."
In the 90's I was fighting conservatives that wanted to censor the much smaller and newer internet from things like violence (games) and porn.
Today it is the left that is attempting to censor the internet over much more nebulous and undefined terms like "misinformation" and "hate speech" all of which have very subjective definitions and seem to be a moving target.
If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored", while you're perfectly entitled to believe that based on seeing a couple specific voices get censored, it's a bit unreasonable to dismiss claims to the contrary as "left wing bias" when the data simply isn't there to support it.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if you end up with political bias in automated censorship and filtering algorithms, the training set is going to be full of bias and it will be hard to filter that out. But they also quite possibly managed to come up with something that isn't leaning in any particular direction.
Between the two possibilities "Twitter is suppressing <x> speech" and "Twitter is not suppressing <x> speech and a few people are crying censorship to try and get unbanned/get attention" I think occam's razor suggests the latter, personally, because we know it has been an effective tactic in the past and that sort of speculative claim gains traction regardless of whether you can prove it.
Lots of people claim to be shadowbanned when they're not, similarly.
You seemed to have missed my primary assertion which has nothing to do with banning or shadowbanning or even the research into those topics
My primary assertion is the terms of service, the rules under which content moderation is governed is a left political bias in many area's include gender, what is considered "hate speech", what is "misinformation"
I do not need to point to any examples of banning to highlight this as it self evident for anyone that reads the terms of service.
"I was cancelled from Twitter for posting about my conservative views!"
"Oh no, you were cancelled for posting about restrained fiscal policy?"
"LOL no, not that."
"Free trade?"
"Not even close."
"Well... what conservative views are you talking about?"
"Oh, you know the ones" wink
I would also hope that's not a "conservative" view as it's simply a scientific fact.
So both sides are right, and yet the conversation between the extremes moved backwards instead of finding common ground.
That's literally what they did. "misgendering someone" is hatespeech/harassment. When from a sane perspective outside the woke cult: Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
The emperor's new dress doesn't make him a woman.
Hit the nail on the head here. Hence, the medical community's current response is to adjust the individual's body, appearance and treatment from others to match their gender as closely as possible.
No, we don't. This is not an yes/no answer. This is the type of question that should be answered in terms of confidence intervals.
> right wing tweets actually got promoted more
In relation to what? What is a "right wing" tweet? What is a "left wing" tweet?
E.g, if the algorithm is focused on filtering out disparaging extreme messages, and it ends up filtering X amount of "non-extreme right wing content", 3X of "extreme right-wing content" and 5X of "extreme left-wing content", it satisfies the claim that "it promotes more right-wing content" while also silencing conservative voices.
The advantage of the right in social media news sharing: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac137/66516...
Upenn article summary: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives...
its like if a policeman is accused of wrongdoing, he gets to investigate if he did that himself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
The replies so far seem to just confirm my point. Doesn't seem like any of them were banned "solely based on ideology" at all.
Come on y'all, show me one example where someone was banned for asking for lower taxes!
Certain biases are baked into Twitter's content moderation policies. For instance, on COVID and gender. It just so happens that conservatives statistically disagree with the positions taken by those policies significantly more than liberals.
Is that an anti-conservative bias? Well, liberals often make the argument that the drug war was prejudicial against black people because the laws specifically targeted drugs that were more common in black communities. If you accept this argument, by parity of reasoning, you should also accept that Twitter's rules are prejudicial against conservative views.
For examples of prominent cancellations, there was Alex Berenson, Megan Murphy, Jordan Peterson, among others. These people aren't all strictly conservatives, but they were banned for views that conservatives mostly agree with.
Days before a national election they deliberately censored a story pertaining to corruption of one of the candidates, censored anyone that shared the story, and censored anyone that mentioned the censoring of the story.
Ultimately that's the reason the story was "censored", it was fake. Something vaguely suspicious sounding about Hunter used to try and malign his dad, and ethical news sites and journalists wanted nothing to do with it.
To this day, there's no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, and even Trump's own justice department failed to charge Hunter, or even continue the investigation, because it was so clearly nothing of note.
I implore you (all) to consider this angle when complaining about "left" boogeymen. Do the fixie-riding anarchists represent the left? Do the alt-right racist and misanthropic school shooters represent the right? What of each side encourages these extremities? Further, which ones do commit societal (psychological, economic, etc.) damage?
Also Alex Berenson's lawsuit with Twitter revealed that public officials leaned on twitter to suppress his voice. I think these emails are revealing on the 'coziness' between the current administration and twitter policy team. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privatel...
Can you imagine if the Trump administration put pressure on twitter to suppress reporters they thought was 'epicenter of disinfo'?
The easiest way to get censored for ideological beliefs was to state that biological sex is a reality: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-tucker-carlso...
Babylon Bee got banned for harmless satire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/babylon-bee-a-factor-in-musk-...
Libs of tiktok was banned for "hate speech." I'm not sure they ever even let the account owner know exactly what was said that deserved censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-popular-accou...
A classic is when the NY Post got locked out for posting factual information that the left wanted to bury before the 2020 election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/nypost-remains-locked-out-of-...
Twitter censored health experts whenever what they said didn't fit the COVID narrative put forth by the CDC: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-white-house-h...
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
James Lindsay got locked out for saying "OK groomer". https://www.dailywire.com/news/author-james-lindsay-banned-f...
Leftists have said many, many more vile and hateful things than that without suffering a single consequence, including making threats on others' lives: https://www.foxnews.com/media/libs-of-tik-tok-creator-twitte...
I agree that "leftist" can be divisive, but I haven't found a different word to use that doesn't also convey what I believe to be a falsehood.
I also carefully use the word "conservative" instead of "Republican", because I don't think those two are the same thing either.
Say what you want about the integrity of mainstream journalism and big tech platforms, but their foibles are nothing compared to the state of Republican-leaning journalism in the United States. It hardly requires a "leftist" political ideology to acknowledge the moral and intellectual decline of the Republican Party and the respective decline of its media apparatus.
None of this excuses selective censorship, obviously, but the suggestion that right-wing journalism deserves equal time and consideration presupposes a credibility and seriousness that it's lacked for twenty years.
Incidentally, there's a whole Quora thread on this topic: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-term-leftist-more-common-th...
It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."
That leaves "liberal" not having an opposite. I think that's the case partially because the word doesn't really mean anything or has too many meetings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liberal-meanin...
The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.
As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:
* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.
* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.
* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.
* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.
* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.
And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?
Edit: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.
They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on average rated as much more untrustworthy than Democratic users, based on either the fact-checker ratings or the politically-balanced layperson ratings."
This is nothing but a glorified credentials argument wrapped in a research paper! This is the kind of "intellectual" superiority" that you find on the left, unfortunately.
Leftist: makes claims, can't be bothered to cite anything to support them.
If only this weren't a typical pattern!
No leftwing popular media? Are you joking? Even left-leaning "bias" sites show that the biggest names in news as being on the left: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
And for AP: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/associated-press/
My only disagreement is to replace "left-center" with far-left.
You reference mediabiasfactcheck.com a hobby site by a creator who says "his methods are not rigorously objective." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check#Methodol...
You reference the dailywire so much when even your own source (mediabiasfactcheck) rates them just short of "extreme right" and rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED"?
Why would anyone take the time to respond to each of your points any more than they would a random Facebook post?
What does it mean to rigorously and objectively classify a news site as on the left or on the right? More importantly, what's your alternative classification system that is more objective and rigorous? It's so easy to criticize, and yet so hard to come up with something better. Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. How do you intend to convince anyone of anything?
None of your dailywire claims have been backed up. You keep dodging that fact.
>Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation.
All I'm trying to "bring to the conversation" is the fact that your "sources" are just links to a site nobody could possibly trust. But since that's clearly good enough for you to take as fact, you're exactly the kind of person they hope to rope in.
I'm not assuming anything, remember? That's according to the source you were crowing about.
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
The folks at mediabiasfactcheck (which you've continuously defended) gave the Daily Wire a "Mixed" ranking for Factual Reporting. They couldn't even make it to "mostly factual" (which seems like a pretty low bar).
Anyways, you didn't actually catch me on anything. I knew long before that Daily Wire had a "mixed" rating on that site. I had also already clicked on all their examples of false reporting, and all of them were climate change-related articles from years ago where they found a scientist who disagreed with the reporting. So, uh, don't trust Daily wire for climate change articles?
Anyways, even a recent hit piece from NPR admitted that daily wire's reporting is mostly factual: https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-accuses-daily-wire-of-tri...
From NPR: "The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to “truthful, accurate and ethical reporting.”"
Please come talk to me again when you're willing to have an honest discussion about a topic, and not when you're just trying, and failing, to score points.
(link to original NPR hit piece here: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/19/1013793067/outrage-as-a-busin...)
(link to analysis of the hit piece from western journal: https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-npr-caught-blatant...)
I've seen accounts get banned for replacing "white" with "black" in popular hateful tweets. Apparently only one kind of racism is allowed on Twitter.[4]
If you read Twitter's reasoning for suspending Trump, you'll see it's based on two tweets, neither of which calls for violence.[5] Twitter had to use the excuse that some people might be emboldened to commit violence by his tweets. That's true for almost any politician. But the president of South Africa's Black First Land First party can threaten to kill white people and only get a seven day suspension.[6] Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, still has a Twitter account[7] despite endorsing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is now blind in one eye and has lost the use of an arm after an assassination attempt in August.
The double standard could not be more obvious.
1. https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1504155537008697352
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20190407204840/https://lawandcri...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...
4. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55863
5. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20181216163405/https://citizen.c...
What is “gender” in the above sentence?
It’s a 1950s attitude that males are born masculine and females feminine - that was largely rejected from the 70s onward, people being held to be unique individuals and gender stereotyping deemed sexist and oppressively limiting.
I was under the impression that young people think gender identity is determined biologically independently of reproductive sex - hence (to them) “Trans women are women” because of their innate gender identity.
Which (if either) is right? - The issue appears to me to be very philosophically confused.
> In since-deleted tweets, the account specifically accused Chasten Buttigieg and The Trevor Project organization of grooming.[40][32][94]
And outright misinformation isn't really an "ideological difference."
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
Leftists accuse conservatives of far worse things than that without ever getting censored. Leftists can event threaten other peoples' lives without getting censored: https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-twitter-accounts-that-have-...
Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Libs of tik tok spread the misinformation, but they didn't create it. They cited someone else. If you don't think it's ok to cite someone else, later find out they lied, and then retract your statement, well, you probably have two standards, one for yourself and one for people you disagree with.
> Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
It's amazing how many lies come from the left and never see any twitter censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/numerous-leftists-on-twitter-...
"Groomer" is a noun that describes someone's actions. "Nazi" is a noun that describes someone's political beliefs. It is absolutely worse to be called a "groomer" because that is a direct claim of immoral and often illegal behavior. "You are doing something bad" is a more serious accusation than "you believe something bad".
And, here is an article talking about how the Trevor project "does" groom people: https://personandidentity.com/mother-of-trans-child-poses-as...
And another on the same story: https://pitt.substack.com/p/the-trevor-project-undercover-mo...
Are those going to get censored if I post them on twitter?
Many people who use the term "groomers" as loosely as LibsOfTikTok already think of this "grooming" as equivalent to a genocide. That is my point. "Groomers" implies that the bad is already happening while "Nazi" implies the bad is a belief with undefined actions. It is the difference between being call a murderer and a psychopath. One says you already did something bad. The other says you might be capable of something bad.
It also has a more specific definition: "the act of deliberately establishing an emotional connection with a child to prepare the child for child abuse".
Today, I think people are using the word to mean a hybrid of the above two definitions, namely, to train or indoctrinate a child into sexual deviancy, even if the person doing the grooming does not take part in it directly.
I think some uses today are also just synonyms for indoctrination, which fits only within the more general definition of grooming.
False accusations of child abuse have on occasion led to jail time for the false accuser.
I can see why you are being downvoted, but I've been observing this trend lately too. Its popular on some social media sites to call half of the country nazis or at least nazi sympathizers.
Neither side has clean hands, but this vilification is extremely harmful.
https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive/blob/main...
I do agree that the content that particular user finds and shows to me is very disturbing, especially given that it is often teachers taking care of very impressionable people(children) in a position of authority.
In order for something to be libel, you have to know it is false and intend for people to believe it is true. The litter box story for example was spread by a trolling organization with the intention of fooling people like LoTT and Tucker. It's not libel because they fell for it — it's stupid, but it's not libel. Likewise, the criticism of the The Trevor Project likely reflects a sincerely held belief that the known activities of TTP constitute "grooming", and not a measurable claim that TTP staff are actively engaging in activities conventionally understood as pedophilia. Also not libel.
Defamation (libel and slander) in the US is distinct depending on how well known the victim is. For a famous victim, yes you must essentially know the statement was false.
But if the victim is not a public individual, you need only act with negligence (e.g. violate the reasonable person standard). The litter box story, for example, doesn't involve famous people, it's like random local school districts, and no reasonable person would believe it to be true. The Trevor project likely does constitute a public organization, so the standard is higher, but only requires actual malice, which means "reckless disregard" for the truth of the statements. It's probably not met, because it is a high standard, but it doesn't actually require that they know themselves to be lying.
There are specifics about what false claims. All they do is repost TikTok’s insanity.
In some ways, LibsofTiktok has done world a whole lot of good, by exposing and immunizing against extreme left ideologies that even the most devout progressives reject.
We need more of this that exposed extremes of either ideology. Because clearly the media has totally failed to do this.
But you'll find a reason for this example and any other to not to fit your criteria.
Another: Stefan Molyneux.
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
The president called it a “very tough period of time,” calling the election “fraudulent.”
“But we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”
> who led his violent supporters to the capitol The capitol was breached while Trump was still speaking to the larger crowd several blocks away.
if twitter's goal was reduction of violence, then they would have amplified Trump's video calling for peaceful dispersion, not delete it.
> We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
Is not a call for the peaceful transition of power and for people to go home. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is not a call for peace. Trump's tweet wasn't an effort to reduce violence, it was an effort to continue to stoke the flames while appearing to help, and people didn't fall for it.
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"
and
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
Silencing those who oppose: co-ed bathrooms, gender reassignment for tweens and teens or gay marriage. Can we jump to the covid blacklists yet
> In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
https://apnews.com/article/twitter-inc-entertainment-music-b...
That entirely reads as a threat against Jewish people.
When I saw that, my assumption was that it was a malapropism.
Clearly happening, yet even here already we have four people so far claiming that it doesn't, and people flagging/downvoting you for telling the truth.
They banned a conservative satire publication ffs. The Babylon Bee.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
—George Orwell, 1984
The Babylon Bee was suspended for targeted harassment. Harassment is not a conservative view.
[1] - https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
That's only "targeted harassment" when redefining words in an arbitrary and disingenuous fashion. The article is not even especially mean hearted, let alone "targeted harassment." And then factor in the fact that the subject is a high ranking and public political figure on top of all of this.
The article is saying that Levine's entire gender identity is a lie. You honestly don't see anything mean spirited about that?
Levine is a random bureaucrat that no one in the public would know the name of if she wasn't trans. By singling her out, conservative media and the Babylon Bee are encouraging people to harass her for no other reason than her transness.
Nitpick: suspended until they deleted a tweet which they have refused to do.
The Bee was banned for violating the rules and promoting transphobia. Is that the "conservative voices... ideology" you're thinking of?
There is a huge difference between no moderation (anarchy), and not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.