TWITTER GOES TO THE SUNKEN PLACE
With me out of the way, the Left proceeded in its crusade to censor Twitter, with a barrage of pressure from their allies in politics and media. A host of feminist windbags, including ghoulish Democratic congresswoman Katherine Clark and hand-wringing British Labour MP Stella Creasy, ginned up a panic about “death threats” and “trolls” who were supposedly striking fear into innocent, powerless women on Twitter. (Coincidentally, these women almost always turned out to be professional feminist activists and left-wing politicians.)
The narrative was repeated ad nauseam across national media in both Britain and America. Slowly, the platform that once proclaimed itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” began to contort into a feminist-friendly safe space. Making a joke about feminists put you at risk for losing your account. But you could tweet #KillAllWhiteMen, #MasculinitySoFragile, or “I BATHE IN MALE TEARS” without a care in the world.
Countless right-wingers have been kicked off Twitter, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently,44 including cultural libertarian YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, and the Canadian writer and anti-feminist Janet Bloomfield. They even put a “safety” filter on all outgoing links to the blog of Vox Day, sci-fi’s leading right-wing iconoclast.
Twitter came down hard on the alt-right—after the 2016 election, dozens of the movement’s prominent voices got the boot. At the same time, Jerome Hudson, an African-American writer for Breitbart, was bombarded with racial slurs including “coon” and “Uncle Tom,” instigated by washed-up rapper Talib Kweli, and Twitter took no action.45 In the two months following the election, social media analytics discovered more than 12,000 tweets calling for the death of Donald Trump—tweets that remain on the platform.46 Yet Twitter continues to profess its political neutrality. In my time as technology editor for Breitbart, I never saw an account suspended for sending death or rape threats to Donald Trump or any other prominent conservative.
Twitter was secretly discriminating against conservative news sources well before the words “fake news” emerged from a progressive news outlet. In February 2016, a source who worked closely with Twitter revealed to Breitbart that the company had been “shadowbanning” inconvenient Twitter users and maintained a “whitelist” of trusted news sources.
“Shadowbanning” is the sneaky practice of removing or minimizing a user’s posts from public view without alerting the user, who often continues posting, believing nothing has changed. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Twitter acknowledged they were hiding tweets from search results.47 They began marking entire accounts as “sensitive content,” forcing users to “opt-in” to see certain tweets, rather than opting out, to remove unwanted information. Drudge Report, the biggest conservative site on the web, was flagged as “sensitive content” by Twitter.
If Dorsey won’t address his platform’s blatant bias, he might one day have to answer to the courts. On March 4, 2016, I asked President Obama’s Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, about the role Obama might play in reminding social media platforms about the importance of protecting free expression.
Earnest made it clear that even Obama believed that the success of social media platforms is “predicated on the important protection of First Amendment rights to self-expression.” He also recommended that Twitter users who feel aggrieved by the platform’s policies turn to lawsuits as a response. Several such lawsuits are already in the works.
That was President Obama, the most powerful progressive of the last two decades. If Twitter’s censorious direction received stern words from his administration, Dorsey ought to be quivering in his Birkenstocks with Trump in office.
The death of Twitter is inevitable at this point, but Dorsey certainly isn’t doing anything to slow down the process. Censorship creates a chilling effect, frightening other users from speaking their minds. On Twitter, a site designed for rapid-fire streams of consciousness, that means nothing less than the death of the platform.
There’s an impression, put about by the media, abetted by Twitter itself and now, stupidly, accepted by just about everyone, that Twitter’s problems and the reason the company hasn’t been acquired boil down to “abuse” and “harassment.”
Actually, the opposite is true. The history of social networks knows no exception to this simple rule: when you start clamping down on free expression, you die. Twitter is no different. Twitter can’t maintain user growth because it’s boring (all the cool people left, or have been banned) and because the product is terrible. Not because of “trolls.” If trolls were the problem, comment sections, Reddit, 4chan and YouTube would have closed down years ago.
People love getting into spats on the internet. Some people spend their whole lives doing it. The only people who object to ridicule and criticism are touchy, fragile celebrities and journalists with brittle egos who can’t cope with readers pointing out how biased and stupid they are. Twitter’s problem is not that there’s too much edgy speech, it’s that there’s too little. Also, Twitter’s product is so badly engineered, people who don’t want to hear from each other too often do.
I can’t believe I’m the only person who understands this.
The media’s “war on trolls” is just another kind of class warfare: politically correct, university-educated elites don’t like how the working classes speak. They’re horrified by the ribald humor, sharp language and raucous tone of blue-collar interactions. So they brand it all as “abuse” and “harassment” and close their comment sections because they are too delicate to engage with ordinary people.
The edgiest and most interesting people have now either left Twitter or been struck off. The platform is dying, and so is the business behind it.48 You know, I sort of feel bad for anyone banned after 2016. They’re so behind the curve.
And as for suspending me because of a spat with Leslie Jones… come off it. I mean, if you’re going to sell out your core values to a celebrity, at least pick someone funny and/or talented, or at least pretty.
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