Shadowbanning is the cowardly practice of ‘boxing’ social media users without actively banning them, so that they may not realize anything is wrong. There have been discussions about whether Twitter would ever ban President Trump. But it already banned top Republicans.
Algorithms employed by Twitter to limit the reach of hateful content are preventing the accounts of prominent Republicans, such as RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, from appearing in search results.
The phenomenon known as “shadow banning” has affected several conservative Republican lawmakers, including Representatives Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, as well as Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman Andrew Surabian. It has not extended to their counterparts on the left, whose accounts continue to auto-populate in Twitter search results.
To what extent is this bias and to what extent is it payback?
A spokesman for Representative Gaetz suggested the shadow ban may be related to the lawmakers’ aggressive questioning of Twitter executives in a hearing last week. During the hearing, Gaetz argued that platforms like Twitter, which claim to be “neutral publishers” under federal law, should not privilege certain forms of content over others.
Twitter’s lefty bias is notorious enough. And, as bad as the company is, as we’ve seen with Google and Facebook, the most vocal employees are often worse and have come out of a culture in which censoring conservatives is not unprofessional, but praiseworthy. And what do you really expect of lefties who live in a bubble and get all their reality from Colbert, Olivers and Bee? This is a structural problem and it can only be solved with more diversity. Ideological diversity.
Google sent a clear message with the firing of James Damore. The dot com monopolies need to prove that they can be trusted to honestly manage the marketplace of ideas.
Or their monopolies have to be broken up.
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