Twitter claimed that Blanchard’s first statement violated rules against “hateful conduct” on the platform.44 Only after a backlash did Twitter backtrack and restore Blanchard’s account.
The implications of this new reality extend well beyond feminists concerned about men in dresses invading their spaces. Pope Francis, for example, has consistently rejected the idea that people can choose whether they are a man or a woman. “Today, children are taught this at school: that everyone can choose their own sex. And why do they teach this? Because the books come from those people and institutions who give money. We are living at a time when humankind as the image of God is being annihilated,” the Holy Father said in August 2016.45 “God created man and woman; God created the world like this and we are doing the exact opposite,”46 he added. In other words, the pope said, men aren’t women. Nobody tell Twitter.
* * *
Twitter’s leftist bias explains why the platform is quick to censor right-of-center accounts and slow to punish leftists.
Twitter suspended Nicholas Fondacaro, a writer for the conservative Media Research Center, for example, after he made fun of Don Lemon’s annual New Year’s Eve routine of getting hammered drunk on national television. Fondacaro credited pressure from conservative media outlets like the Daily Caller for Twitter reinstating his account.47
Twitter also permanently suspended a parody account making fun of Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke in January 2019. The account, called “Beto’s Blog,” is run by an anonymous user who tweets parody versions of O’Rourke’s diary-style blog posts. Twitter said it permanently suspended the account for violating its rules against “impersonation.”48 That excuse is laughable. Twitter is filled with satire and parody accounts targeting everyone across the spectrum—it’s one of the things that makes the platform enjoyable. But Twitter agreed with whoever reported “Beto’s Blog”: the laughs had to go. Once again, Twitter only reversed course after conservative media outlets exposed the company’s double-standards.49
In another incident, Twitter suspended a user for criticizing Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, and only reversed its decision after it received an inquiry from the Daily Caller News Foundation, my employer.50
Conservative protests aren’t always enough, however, to make Twitter reverse its decisions. Twitter banned the Center for Immigration Studies from promoting any tweet that included the words “illegal aliens.”51 Twitter also banned ads for a Christian book that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In neither case did Twitter reverse its rulings.
Kathleen McKinley
Kathleen McKinley is a conservative blogger and commentator in Houston, Texas. Twitter suspended her in July 2018 for two older tweets that allegedly violated its rules against “hateful conduct.” One was a month-old tweet that opposed medically clearing transgender people for military service—a policy position shared by many Republicans and many members of the military. The other tweet, from September 2017, tied “extreme Muslim beliefs” to the practice of honor-killings. Ironically, perhaps, Twitter suspended McKinley one day after a Muslim immigrant in McKinley’s hometown was convicted of murdering two people in an honor-killing. McKinley returned to Twitter when her suspension ended but the company has yet to offer her an explanation or an apology for the suspension.
Jesse Kelly
In November 2018, Twitter banned conservative commentator and radio host Jesse Kelly. Unlike the first prominent users Twitter placed in its crosshairs, Kelly is a Marine combat veteran and former Republican congressional candidate. Twitter never told him why he was suspended, which is a clear violation of its own terms of service. I know Jesse. The idea that he’s too extreme to participate in public conversation is laughable, as both liberals and conservatives quickly pointed out. Andy Lassner, an executive producer for Ellen Degeneres, slammed Twitter. “I’m as liberal as they come. Jesse is a harmless guy who happens to be funny as hell, not to mention my friend,” Lassner tweeted. “If Twitter really banned him, that’s just stupid.”52 Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, referring specifically to the Jesse Kelly case, agreed, saying that “The trend of de-platforming and shutting down speech is a bad precedent for our free speech society.”53 With criticism mounting, and Republican senators even hinting at Congressional hearings about Twitter’s policies, Twitter reinstated Jesse’s account, but still refused to explain why it had banned him in the first place.
In an op-ed, Jesse framed Twitter’s decision to ban him as part of a larger societal trend and warned that “the American spirit of free speech has been replaced by people who want uncomfortable speech censored. Nowhere is this more apparent than the social media world.” Kelly noted the massive influence that Big Tech has accumulated in our lives and our politics: “As I have said before, social media is not a small thing. It is no longer three nerds with pocket protectors huddled in their dorm rooms dreaming about a day when a woman acknowledges their existence. Social media has surpassed the telephone. It is the means of networking and communicating with others: 2.5 billion people use Facebook and Twitter. That is not a fringe thing that is going away. It has now become the way humans interact with each other. It is completely run by Silicon Valley leftists who know the power they hold. And they are using that power.”54
“Learn to Code”
Any doubts about the influence liberal journalists exercise over Twitter were eliminated by the “learn to code” fiasco. When coal miners lose their jobs, journalists often write about creative destruction and the evolving modern economy. They’ll just have to learn how to code is a common attitude. But of course when journalists lose their jobs, journalists write about the free press becoming endangered and the need for protective legislation. After Vice, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed News laid off dozens of journalists in January 2019, some Internet trolls mocked them with the phrase “Learn to Code.” In response, journalists lobbied Twitter to penalize people who tweeted the phrase at them. Twitter obliged, essentially declaring the joke off-limits on the platform. After critics pointed out the absurdity of Twitter suspending people for tweeting “learn to code,” the company claimed it was only penalizing users who took part in a “targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals—a policy that’s long been against the Twitter Rules.”55 That clearly wasn’t true. Twitter suspended Daily Caller editor in chief Geoffrey Ingersoll for tweeting “Learn to code” at the Daily Show, a Comedy Central show that wasn’t a target of any organized campaign.56
Dana Loesch
Liberal Twitter users regularly launch vile and disgusting attacks on former National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch, without getting dinged for rule violations. “You feckless cunt.” “Stupid cunt.” “You, lady, are a stupid fucking cunt. Rot in hell.” “Whose cock did you suck Dana?” “Typical gun-toting racist bitch.” Those are all real tweets that have been directed at Loesch—and they’re only a tiny sample of the abuse she regularly experiences on Twitter every day. But Twitter doesn’t care.
Dana and her husband, Chris Loesch, once reported a liberal Twitter user who said that if the couple’s children “need to be murdered” for Dana to change her mind about gun control, then “I guess that’s what needs to happen.” Twitter reviewed their report and returned a verdict: the tweet was fine. “We have reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior,” Twitter wrote in an email to Chris.57 It was only after the Loesches went public with Twitter’s response and conservative media put Twitter on blast (notice a trend?) that Twitter announced it had “re-reviewed” Chris’s report. “We have re-reviewed the account you reported and have locked it because we found it to be in violation of the Twitter Rules,” the company wrote in an email to Chris. Twitter also noted that the user would be allowed to reenter the platform as soon as he deleted his tweet about murdering Dana’s kids.58 (The same condition that it placed on Meghan Murphy’s tweets about biological sex.)
The incident occurred in October 2018, a full year after Twitter made a public show about protecting its users. But Twitter doesn’t actually care about protecting all of its users. The rules do not exist to be neutrally enforced; the rules exist to give Twitter a basis for caving whenever the left wants a tweet deleted or a tweeter blocked. In late 2016, Dana received death threats on Twitter that were serious and detailed enough that the couple contacted the police. The police began an investigation, but Twitter got in the way. Documents I obtained show that law enforcement officials reported that they had “completed and submitted grand jury subpoenas to Twitter [but] Twitter declined to acknowledge the subpoena and release any information despite our [county] grand jury issuing the order.”
Twitter doesn’t take threats against conservatives seriously, and that’s especially the case for conservative women. Just ask Meghan McCain.
Meghan McCain
Meghan McCain, a host on The View and the daughter of the late senator and Vietnam hero John McCain, has been a regular target of hate and bile on Twitter. But Twitter, which aggressively cracked down on conservatives who tweeted “learn to code,” was curiously slow to respond to the hatred directed at McCain. In the days after John McCain’s funeral, for example, a Twitter user posted a doctored photo showing a gun pointed at Meghan as she approached her father’s casket. “America, this ones for you,” the photo’s caption read. The tweet remained on the platform for more than twelve hours, despite dozens of conservatives reporting it to Twitter and asking the site to take it down. Only after Meghan’s husband, Ben Domenech, tweeted at Dorsey directly did Twitter remove the tweet. “Hey @jack, this has been up for half a day. It has been reported 100+ times. No response. Tell me why this is cool by you,” Domenech wrote.59 Once again, Twitter only took action because a concerted effort from conservatives criticizing both the company and Dorsey personally made deleting the offending post the better public relations option.
Dorsey was asked about Twitter’s hesitance to remove the death threats against McCain when he testified before Congress on September 5, 2018. “That was unacceptable,” Dorsey replied. When the committee asked if he had apologized to the McCain family, Dorsey said, “I haven’t personally, but I will.”60 Days passed without an apology, then weeks, and then months. Still, no apology arrived. Perhaps Dorsey forgot about the promise he made under oath? Perhaps, but unlikely. Domenech published a scathing article in November 2018, castigating Dorsey for his broken promise. “Jack Dorsey has never contacted my wife or me to apologize,” Domenech wrote in an article titled, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Lied Under Oath To Congress. Shouldn’t That Matter?”61 You might assume that after Domenech’s public reminder of the broken promise, Dorsey would have leapt into action, but that wasn’t the case. Yet more days passed without an apology, then weeks, and then months. Domenech told me that Dorsey finally called at the end of January 2019—nearly five months after he promised Congress that he would. The incident was a microcosm of Dorsey’s entire playbook when confronted about his company’s left-wing bias: pay lip service to the problem and then do as little as possible to actually address it.
Twitter’s Journalists
Twitter long billed itself as a passive platform, but in June 2018, Twitter announced it would emphasize breaking news, with personalized news feeds for each user.62 Twitter product vice president Keith Coleman explained to Bloomberg News that Dorsey “often says we want Twitter to be the little bird on your shoulder that tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it. When something important happens on Twitter, we want Twitter to tap you on the shoulder and say ‘hey, this is going on and we want you to check it out.’ ” Social media is already personalized by the consumer: people choose what to read. Twitter seeks to “personalize” it on the producer end: it will tell you what to read. Telling consumers what to read, however, is exercising news judgment—which is the job of journalists. The company’s own postings make it clear that Twitter is now in the journalism business, whether it acknowledges it or not.
“We’re looking for an experienced, innovative and detail-oriented reporter, expert in social media and passionate about journalism, to fill out the team,” one December 2018 job posting read.63 The opening was for a position on Twitter’s “breaking news team.” The job posting explained that “Twitter is where news is most often first reported, and a single Tweet often drives the news agendas of the world’s largest media companies. The breaking news team will be part of an experimental initiative to detect, verify and explain the biggest stories breaking on Twitter in real time.” It informed applicants that as “a member of the Curation team, you will be based in San Francisco, and report to the deputy breaking news lead. In this role, you will be responsible for monitoring and verifying news alerts, quickly and accurately summarizing and updating them, and sourcing Tweets that accurately explain and contextualize what is happening in real time.” Journalism. That’s called journalism.
The process described in that job post is essentially the same process that breaking news teams at CNN and Fox News go through. The difference is that CNN and Fox News acknowledge that they’re media companies. Twitter doesn’t but is moving into that role in order to keep users on the platform longer. As a bonus it will further control what users see on the platform.
Twitter is becoming just another liberal news company—and the early results have been atrocious. In January 2019, Twitter helped amplify a vicious smear against a group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Lexington, Kentucky. The boys, some of whom wore MAGA hats, were in Washington, D.C., for the 2019 March for Life. The way the story was told, the group of boys swarmed an elderly Native American man, Nathan Phillips, and racially harassed him as he tried to walk away from the Indigenous People’s March the same day. A selectively edited clip showed Phillips beating his drum in front of a boisterous crowd of boys, and it was alleged that the boys had racially harassed the old man. Phillips gave a teary-eyed monologue about the sad incident and what it meant for America. Journalists fawned. There was just one problem: none of it was true. Had any journalists watched the full video before sending social media mobs at high school students, they would have seen that Phillips was lying.
“Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. The BHI has existed since the late nineteenth century and is best described as a black nationalist cult movement; its members believe they are descendants of the ancient Israelites, and often express condemnation of white people, Christians, and gays. D.C.-area Black Hebrews are known to spout particularly vile bigotry,” Reason magazine’s Robby Soave wrote in a thorough debunking of the media’s smear job. “Phillips put himself between the teens and the black nationalists, chanting and drumming as he marched straight into the middle of the group of young people. What followed was several minutes of confusion: The teens couldn’t quite decide whether Phillips was on their side or not, but tentatively joined in his chanting. It’s not at all clear this was intended as an act of mockery rather than solidarity.” Soave called it “as misguided a rush to judgment as the [famously false] Rolling Stone story” about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. (He was one of the few journalists to question that egregious hoax as well.)
Twitter promoted the misleading narrative about the Covington High School students to its millions of users in its curated “Moments” feature, stating “A diocese in Kentucky is investigating after a video showed students from Covington Catholic High School taunting Omaha elder and Vietnam veteran Nathan Phillips at a rally in Washington. Many of the students were wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.”64
The story was then off and running on Twitter, which added a New York Times tweet that read: “Video showing a group of high school b
oys, many wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ gear, surrounding and jeering a Native American elder at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, is drawing widespread condemnation.” Twitter also included a tweet from CNN commentator Ana Navarro, which read: “Native-American elder taunted by racist MAGA-hat wearing teens, speaks and cries for America, the country he defended and sacrificed and wore the uniform for. It is people like Nathan Phillips who make America great.”
Not only did Twitter direct hate against high school students who never asked to be famous, they then stood by as Kathy Griffin and other prominent liberals urged their followers to publicly identify the boys in the video so they could be more thoroughly shamed. Left-wingers soon posted online the names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers of Covington students and their families. Their students’ and families’ voicemail and inboxes were flooded with hate and threats of violence. I reported Griffin to Twitter—she was clearly violating Twitter’s terms of service, and Twitter did nothing.
The establishment liberal media that Big Tech wants to elevate as “authoritative” sources were culpable in the smearing of these high school students. The people who exposed the truth were the sort of reporters or “citizen journalists” that Big Tech wants to marginalize. For Big Tech, the issue isn’t about free speech, or true investigative reporting, or telling the truth—it’s about advancing an agenda.
What Trends, What Doesn’t, and Why?
Twitter’s trending topics section has tremendous influence over its users. It directs the attention of tens of millions of people towards a handful of topics. When Twitter users click a trending topic, they’ll see tweets on the subject from people they follow intermixed with the top results. Tweeting about trending topics makes a user’s tweets more likely to be seen, and it also means that whoever decides what’s trending has an enormous amount of power over the national discussion. In the early days of Twitter, what trended was determined by how rapidly and often a hashtag was tweeted.
The Manipulators Page 10
