Breitbart News Tech Editor Colin Madine joined Senior Editors at Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Thursday, to discuss Twitter’s censorship of conservatives.
“It’s shaking the tech world. Our own shithole is Silicon Valley, which we cover, and it’s ablaze,” declared Madine in response to the Project Veritas investigation which revealed employees bragging about censorship against conservatives. “What James O’Keefe and Project Veritas captured are these Twitter employees [and] former Twitter employees speaking very frankly, very openly, because they’ve never had any consequences — they don’t understand that any other worldview than theirs exist — talking about the ways that they censor conservatives, drive conservative thought off their platform, various tricks they use, how embarrassing it would be if other people find out, how if an account is interested in God, guns, and America that it must be a Russian bot, so they drive them off the platform. It’s just mind-boggling stuff.”
“If I was to try to summarize it very briefly, what it boils down to is, one, them bragging about having systems and even artificial intelligence they’re developing to drive conservatives off the platform or making them very hard to track in terms of following people,” he continued. “They talk about letting individual employees exercise their bias, like, ‘I don’t like Trump so if I see people that like Trump, I’m just going to ban them.’ But to just briefly touch on probably the most important thing for people to understand, because it’s the worst, is shadow banning.”
“The idea of shadow banning is to make someone think they’re a perfectly normal account, tweeting out, when in reality it’s like they’re kind of shouting into a black hole. No one sees their tweets, their engagement craters, their retweets crater. They do this to normal people like you and I, and they do it to major personalities,” Madine explained. “Some of the big names on Twitter experience this, and they can show it on graphs. You can see the graph nosedive… On Breitbart Tech we’ve been talking about this for eighteen months… One of the pieces we put out today is, ‘ Here are five pieces we’ve done over the past eighteen months that say exactly what Twitter employees said today.’ So we’ve been on top of this, but now it’s them glibly admitting it.”
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour then pointed out to listeners that though Twitter is a private company, they have also become the public square online.
“Now I know that some people will probably say, ‘Now wait a minute, it’s a private company and they have the right to do…'” Mansour proclaimed. “When you have a company like Twitter that has become so important to our dialogue in our nation, it has become such an important platform, it has literally become like the cyber public square, and when you have this private corporation doing this sort of thing, they can be as stifling of your free speech as any government, because Twitter has become, as I said, the public square, so I just want people to keep that in mind because I know there’s going to be libertarians that say ‘It’s a private corporation and who cares, they have the right to ban you,’ but just keep that in mind, folks.”
Madine explained, “Twitter’s changed to be this Twitter we know today. It is really tied to the CEO Jack Dorsey, who’s the co-founder of the company but wasn’t in charge for many years. The previous CEO was very much a free speech supporter, and he fought internally for free speech, even though of course he’s liberal like all of them, but he saw the value for his company in free speech — but Jack Dorsey came back in, brought a wave of progressive politics, and it’s been downhill since.”
“If anyone out there has always wondered why does Twitter not have basic functions like an edit button, or why is Twitter down regularly? Or the pictures don’t load? It’s because instead of hiring more of those good engineers who build things and make cool things happen online, they’re hiring censors to keep conservatives off their platform, and they’re hiring censors to watch those censors and make sure they censor the right stuff,” he concluded. “If the ideas are so clownishly wrong, just blow us out in debate. But instead what you see is there can’t be a debate, they have to shut down all discussion… They have to gerrymander their platforms to keep Breitbart articles from trending.”
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.