Executives at the social media website Twitter reportedly promised in a recent shareholder meeting to be more transparent about its censorship of conservatives, but still claim that the site is unbiased in its blacklisting of accounts.
During a recent shareholder meeting, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promised to be more transparent about why conservatives are routinely banned on his social media platform. At the meeting, Scott Shepard, Deputy Director of the Free Enterprise Project (FEP) at the National Center for Public Policy Research, submitted the following question:
Twitter regularly discriminates against customers who express center/right positions. Just a couple recent examples: Many users were suspended or banned on the false grounds that they had incited the January 6th intrusion into the Capitol, but you allow leaders of terrorist regimes as well as anonymous users to celebrate genuine, deadly attacks on Israel. You permit, without comment or response, LeBron James to threaten and stoke violence toward a police officer against whom no charges of wrongdoing had been laid. You suspended James O’Keefe for posting a video that simply recorded a CNN producer admitting the network’s bias, poor journalistic practices and efforts to stir up racial division, but you said that it was fine for users to describe a Syrian Muslim shooter in Colorado as a “white Christian terrorist.”
As long as you remain the only game in town, you are obliged by law to act as a common carrier, treating all customers with objective equality. Since you won’t do that, will you call on your fellow tech companies to stop thwarting competitors to Twitter, or will you instead acknowledge that it’s time for the federal government to institute antitrust action against you?
The meeting’s moderators summarized his question as: “Why do you continue to censor only on the conservative side?”
Dorsey responded to Shepard, stating:
We have no bias in any of our policies, in our enforcement, in our machine-learning algorithms. If we ever find anything even hinting at that, we look at it immediately and rectify it. If we make any mistakes along the way, we admit to them and correct them.
And I think the most important thing that we can do always is be more transparent with how our rules work, how our enforcements have taken place, and not just to the person directly but ultimately for anyone who happens to be looking at the actions. People should know why we took an action or why we didn’t take an action. Sometimes there might be assumptions around a particular content that we took action on, but underneath there might be other things going on, like manipulation of the network or spam-like activities or accounts manipulation, that we have to take action on as well.
So, we’re gonna do a better job at making sure that these are transparent so that people see that there is no bias in our action, and we’re going to make sure that we have a much more robust appeals process, so that when we do get things wrong, people can appeal the decision and we can correct it.”
Many have claimed that Twitter has shown clear bias against conservatives in the past, not only banning those that share stories that may negatively affect Democrat candidates, but going as far as to ban former U.S. President Donald Trump from the platform entirely.
Read more about Twitter’s alleged conservative bias at Breitbart News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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