Big Tech companies claim that their censorship is impartial. That’s obviously nonsense. When Twitter embeds “fact checks” from partisan Democrat sources, e.g. the mainstream media, under President Trump’s tweets, that’s not impartial.
It’s extremely partial.
(As a thought experiment, imagine the media reaction to a Daily Caller fact check embedded under a Bernie Sanders tweet about socialist economics.)
And the enforcers are, of course, very partial.
Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of “developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,” like the one that led Twitter to slap a new “misleading” warning label on two of President Trump’s tweets concerning nationwide mail-in balloting on Tuesday.
However, Roth’s own barrage of anti-Trump, politically charged tweets seemingly calls into question whether he should be creating guidelines for the president and other Twitter users, especially when Twitter is under fire for its alleged left-wing bias.
Roth has previously referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS,” mocked Trump supporters by saying that “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,” and called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “personality-free bag of farts.” Last August, Twitter suspended McConnell’s Twitter account, prompting the GOP to threaten to cut off advertising on the site until Twitter relented.
In September 2016, Roth tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t fu-k around anymore.”
“I’m almost ready to stop dwelling on how my friends are complicit in the election of Donald Trump,” he said on Jan. 7, 2017. “Almost.”
“Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St,” Roth wrote on Jan. 20, 2017, followed by a “heart” emoji and the words “San Francisco.”
Suffice it to say, he’s partial.
Twitter is fighting back by claiming that no single individual is responsible for censorship policy, which may or may not be true, but is there a single politically neutral Twitter executive making censorship policy and is Roth being kept away from policies that will impact Trump and the election? All good questions for hearings and trade and regulatory action.
If Big Tech is going to go all in on censorship aimed at conservatives, conservatives have little to lose by going FCC on them.
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