Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Saturday that he “fully admit[s]” Twitter employees share a largely left-leaning bias after facing accusations that conservatives are discriminated against on the social media platform.In an interview that aired Saturday on CNN, Dorsey said his company has a responsibility to be open about its political viewpoints, but to operate without bias when applying content policies to users.”We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is … is more left-leaning,” Dorsey says.”But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? And we are not. Period,” he added.
His statement that this left-leaning bias is not affecting Twitter’s ban/suspension decisions, however, is demonstrably untrue, and Dorsey admitted as much before Twitter reversed itself on the Jones’ Twitter account suspension.
Dorsey appears to referring, at least in part, to the bizarre statement Twitter released about it not shadow-banning shadow banning conservative voices.
Over at the Federalist, Doug Wead presents a compelling case showing how YouTube—owned by Google—censors pro-Trump and conservative content. The piece is lengthy, but the gist of it is that an ad promoting one of Wead’s interviews with Fox Business network was banned, his account even briefly suspended, because the interview included President Trump saying the Mueller probe was a “witch hunt.”
Almost a year ago, an employee noticed a YouTube video at the top of a “Doug Wead” search and wondered how it got there. It wasn’t related to the date, the view count, or anything else that they could determine. But since it was there, at Google’s omniscient discretion, we decided to do something we had never done before: buy an ad to promote it. That’s when our troubles began.Within days, Google blocked my ad and informed my team that we had violated their policies. I called Google. The problem, they explained, was that the video had hate speech.It was a Fox Business Network video with Trish Regan interviewing me about the Russian collusion investigation. The Google employee could not find the exact offending words, but referred me to various other supervisors up the ladder.. . . . Google employees appeared to be baffled. Could they call me back tomorrow, they asked? The next day, Nurse Ratched at Google finally emerged. I was never given her name, but conversations with her employees indicated her sex. It was nothing that I or Regan had said in the video, her team explained. Huh?No, no, the problem, I was told, was in the “crawler of words along the bottom of the video.” It was a quote of Trump declaring that the Robert Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt.” This was apparently hate speech.Hmmm. You’re saying to me that words from the duly elected president of the United States cannot be shown on YouTube—words that have already been printed in The New York Times?
Wead goes on to explain that a similar thing happened earlier this year.
In January, 2018 my channel was hit by shadow-banning. Sometime that month, Google allegedly hired thousands of outside actors supplied by the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center. This was the organization that attacked Ben Carson, the only African American in Donald Trump’s cabinet. They were apparently the new arbiters of decency.My videos got hammered. But only my pro-Trump material. My interviews defending the Obama children or talking up Chelsea Clinton’s wedding went untouched.A viral YouTube interview with me and Fox Anchor Neil Cavuto about why Hillary Clinton lost the election was penalized. The video had more than 861,000 views and was earning an average of 15,000 views a day when it suddenly went dark. On February 17, after the new censorship took hold, this video dropped to 50 views a day. That is where it has stayed ever since.
The message is clear. If you want to espouse pro-Democrat points of view and progressive-approved content, you are free to do so. Move off the plantation, though, and you’re banned, either outright or by stealth (the infamous shadow ban).