An online news and social networking service established in 2006 by co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled for all languages except Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Ajit Pai, FCC chairman appointed by President Trump, called out Twitter in 2017 for appearing to have a “double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users.” This was previously exposed in a covert operation by Project Veritas that recorded 8 current or former employees of the Orwellian company explaining the methods used such as biased algorithms and shadow banning. Even after the undeniable admissions, former CEO Jack Dorsey denied any wrongdoing, but would announce in May 2018 an algorithm tweak to shadow ban as according to “behavioral signals’ they dictate. In April 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion.
In May 2018, Twitter announced a new algorithm tweak which basically shadow bans anyone their “machine” determines to be a “troll,” by using “behavioral signals” to determine if anyone is distorting or detracting from public conversation. Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Del Harvey, and director of product management David Gasca, on May 15, 2018, explained their “New Approach,” via the Twitter blog, after explaining the new algorithm was aimed at addressing the problem of “trolls.”
Today, we use policies, human review processes, and machine learning to help us determine how Tweets are organized and presented in communal places like conversations and search. Now, we’re tackling issues of behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation in those areas by integrating new behavioral signals into how Tweets are presented. By using new tools to address this conduct from a behavioral perspective, we’re able to improve the health of the conversation, and everyone’s experience on Twitter, without waiting for people who use Twitter to report potential issues to us.
There are many new signals we’re taking in, most of which are not visible externally. Just a few examples include if an account has not confirmed their email address, if the same person signs up for multiple accounts simultaneously, accounts that repeatedly Tweet and mention accounts that don’t follow them, or behavior that might indicate a coordinated attack. We’re also looking at how accounts are connected to those that violate our rules and how they interact with each other.
These signals will now be considered in how we organize and present content in communal areas like conversation and search. Because this content doesn’t violate our policies, it will remain on Twitter, and will be available if you click on “Show more replies” or choose to see everything in your search setting. The result is that people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search.
In other words Twitter went from denying they shadow ban people to announcing they not only do it, but they are tweaking their algorithms to kick the practice into high gear, by making themselves the arbiter of what is “healthy” in a conversation, who is and who isn’t a “troll,” and censoring and hiding the content of a user if they “interact” with someone their “machine” has already determined to be someone that behaves badly.
First off, there is a huge difference between a “troll,” and someone that simply disagrees and wants to debate a topic. A troll does nothing but attack others, is incapable of being civil, never addresses the topic being discussed, and consistently attempts to sow discord among discussion participants. What Twitter is doing is setting up their platform to only allow conversations they agree with, while hiding anything they don’t like by labeling it “unhealthy.”
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey took to the platform to claim “Our ultimate goal is to encourage more free and open conversation.” He doesn’t even appear to understand the irony of claiming they want more free and open conversation while defending the practice of censoring that “free and open conversation.” Dorsey also claims they are doing this to “reduce the ability to game and skew our systems.”
The reaction to his statement on Twitter shows exactly what people think of his attempts to defend outright censorship, with one user responding to him with “Better to encourage hearing dissenting voices, which is supposed to encourage individual free thinking instead of “group think.”
Another user highlights how conservatives are already targeted by Twitter, stating “It only works if it is applied fairly but any program is only as good as those who do the programming. So far, 2 months in, your system is very biased toward conservatives, GOP and Trump supporters. You won’t even remove a page that shows child-porn.”
That is the problem right there in a nutshell, as Project Veritas has already published multiple under cover videos where Twitter employees admitted to “teaching” their machines to label users that talk about God, guns, and America as “bots.”
In fact, Dorsey admitted on tape that Twitter is so liberal that its conservative employees ‘Don’t Feel Safe’!
Sometimes Twitter takes punitive action without notifying anyone, including the subject. The practice of “shadowbanning” involves quietly hiding tweets in certain regions, with some effort put into preventing the target from realizing his posts have been deleted or made invisible to many other users.
In a similar vein, Twitter has been known to use automated filters that will render tweets containing “abusive” language invisible. The user is given no indication that anything is wrong – it looks like he’s successfully tweeted a message, but no one else ever sees it. After the Paris terror attack, media organizations noticed that automated filters were blocking images and keywords deemed “sensitive,” including gruesome photos and keywords thought to be used by ISIS supporters.
Such tools are supposed to cut down on harassment and abusive tweets, with the understanding that review by human administrators is impossible – Twitter processes around 500 million messages per day. However, the potential for tweaking these automatic filters to expand the definition of “abusive language” and turn them into tools of ideological oppression is clear.
Free-speech advocates have worried that Twitter’s decision to work with certain activist groups to crack down on “harassment” can give those groups an unhealthy degree of influence over the platform, as they file a high volume of dubious harassment charges to silence people they don’t like. The results can be disturbingly similar to the “safe space” and crybully censorship sweeping college campuses, in which the definition of harassment is slowly expanded to include much more than vile slurs, clear-cut attempts at intimidation, and violent threats. Complaining about bullies turns out to be a very effective means of bullying people.
Some Twitter censorship campaigns have been conducted by bypassing human administrators and deliberately abusing automated response systems. A few years ago, there was a rash of incidents known as “spam-flagging,” in which organized mobs of Twitter users were blowing targeted individuals off the service by marking a large number of their messages as “spam,” or unsolicited advertising. Twitter had introduced a “Block and Report Spam” feature to crack down on bot programs that were spewing ad messages into users’ timelines. It didn’t take long for activist mobs – usually left-wing mobs targeting conservatives – to realize they could use this reporting feature to lock the accounts of their enemies.
Twitter, along with many other popular social media platforms, has been criticized for being too willing to cooperate with government demands for censorship.
The French government’s desire to suppress certain material after the Paris terror attack, as mentioned above, is one example, but more authoritarian governments have even more aggressive censorship demands. One controversial example was Twitter agreeing to Pakistan’s demands to suppress “blasphemous” content in summer 2014.
That’s a very heavy censorship hand for a company whose CEO declared, just five years ago, “We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party.” It’s possible to have robust free speech while policing the most obviously abusive, obscene, or threatening language, but Twitter is looking more and more like a campus “safe space,” with the attendant abuses… and even less willingness on the part of administrators to justify their actions.
Twitter’s censorship of conservatives and alternative media has included the suppression of pro-life speech while allowing… almost advocating violence on women. Alternative Media icon Alex Jones was permanently banned from the Twitter platform in September 2018.
Twitter is also greatly interfering with the 2020 election process. In May 2020, Twitter added “fact check” labels to tweets from President Trump warning voters about the potential for fraud in mail-in ballots. The decision came just days after a USPS mail carrier in West Virginia was charged with fraud for tampering with vote-by-mail requests.
During the Minneapolis riots, Twitter again censored one of the President’s tweets, falsely accusing him of “glorifying violence” over a tweet that linked rioting to gun violence. The month after, Twitter put a “public interest notice” on one of Trump’s tweets warning that violent rioters outside the White House would be met with force, accusing him of “threatening harm against an identifiable group.”
In July, Twitter took down a meme retweeted by the President in response to a copyright claim by the New York Times, despite the fact that the image was substantially edited. In August 2020, Twitter took down a Fox & Friends interview with the President, accusing Trump of spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19. Also in August Twitter hid (claiming it was “misinformation”) another tweet by the President after he tweeted that mail drop boxes are a “voter security disaster,” that allow people to vote multiple times. The president also warned that the mailboxes are not sanitized to prevent the spread of the Chinese virus.1
“Quality Filter”
Jim Hanson, former member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, discusses why he believes that Twitter is biased against Republicans and conservatives. He says,
They implemented what they call a quality filter that allows a liberal mob to attack conservative accounts using some of the tools Twitter built them – including these mass block lists where liberals have gathered hundreds of thousands of conservative accounts and Twitter built them a tool where with one push of a button they can block those accounts. And Twitter counts that as a black mark against the account. They’re using this as kind of a hecklers veto and its affecting a lot of conservatives. It’s affecting Republican politicians… Their accounts are not being seen as much as their democrat opponents.
Terms of Service Explicitly Allows Pedophiles to Discuss ‘Attraction Towards Minors’ on Their Platform
Social media giant Twitter quietly amended their terms of service in Nov 2019 to allow for “discussions related to… attraction towards minors” to be allowed on their platform.
“Discussions related to child sexual exploitation as a phenomenon or attraction towards minors are permitted, provided they don’t promote or glorify child sexual exploitation in any way,” reads Twitter’s terms of service.
Twitter also noted that they would allow for nude depictions of children on their platform in certain instances.
Twitter’s New Fact-Checking Tool:
Twitter Partner Status
According to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who is suing Twitter for voter fraud during his 2020 campaign in Massachusetts, has proven Twitter has built a special portal (the ‘Trusted Twitter Partnership’) offered to certain governmental entities so that government officials can flag and delete content they dislike for any reason, as part of what they call “Twitter Partner Status.” Of course Donald Trump, who was censored and ultimately banned by Twitter, didn’t enjoy that privilege as it is reserved for deep state and leftist government officials.1
In late July Dr. Shiva released another explosive report revealing how election officials and government actors work together to coordinate with social media platforms to silence speech in America.2
2022 Purchase by Elon Musk
Elon Musk purchased Twitter after contentious negotiations, thereby transforming the tech giant into a private company. Twitter announced the sale on 25 April 2022, with Musk paying $54.20 per share, approximately $44 billion in total. The news came after two weeks of back and forth between Twitter and Musk’s negotiation team.
In an effort to thwart the purchase maneuver by Musk it was rumored that Twitter would employ a “poison pill” tactic. However, that tactic was abandoned. Musk, at the time, was the world’s wealthiest person according to Forbes, with an almost $279 billion fortune. In the lead up to the Twitter purchase, Musk tweeted his ideas a number of times to his more than 80 million followers, about what he might do if he purchased the company. He joked about defeating “the spam bots or die trying!”
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
He also posted various polls about what users might want, such as an “edit” option for tweets with mistakes. News of Musk’s Twitter takeover sparked leftist outrage at the fact that a “free speech absolutist” would have influence over what happens on the platform.
Elon would back out of the Twitter deal in July 2022 after several attempts to obtain information from Twitter on how many accounts were bot controlled (fake accounts). They refused to disclose any information but sued Musk to enforce the offer after initially trying to deny him the ability to purchase.1
Clinton & Soros Funding Twitter Accounts
Independent journalist, Kyle Clifton, joins One America’s Alison Steinberg to discuss the shady financing behind the anonymous Twitter account – Patriot Takes.
Sources:
Chronological History of Events Related to Twitter
Trump WH Implements EO to Prevent Tech Giants from Altering Users’ Free Speech, Demands Transparency
Twitter Targets QAnon: Nukes 7,000 Accounts, Restricts 150,000 More
Twitter Bans Jewish Star of David in Profile Images – Deems it “Hateful Imagery”
Twitter Restricts Account of Michael Flynn’s Attorney, Sidney Powell
Twitter Censors President Trump, Labels His Parody Video Tweet Mocking CNN as “Manipulated Media”
Twitter Hires China CCP-Linked AI Expert
Twitter Suspends Account and YouTube Removes Video of Biotech Company that Created COVID-19 Treatment Using UV Light in Lungs
WaPo Colludes with Tech Giants to Deplatform Judicial Watch For Posting Accurate Data on Iowa Voting Rolls
Zero Hedge is Suspended from Twitter
