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It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals


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2020 May 29, 8:10am   317 views  2 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/ (from 2019)

Until now, conservatives have had to rely on anecdotes to make their case. To see whether there is an empirical basis for such claims, I decided to look into the issue of Twitter bias by putting together a database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. My results make it difficult to take claims of political neutrality seriously. Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump. ...

It is possible that I missed certain cases. In order to ensure reproducibility, I have made the data on suspended individuals and groups available online. And I invite readers to contact me if I missed any cases or made any errors. But given the wide variety of sources we used to compile the database, it is unlikely that any oversights would be substantial enough to meaningfully change the results. ...

Twitter debuted in 2006. Yet I could not find a case of the company suspending or banning a prominent person before May 2015.


Gosh, when did Trump announce he would be running for president? Such a coincidence.

As noted above, of the 22 suspended individuals, only one was a Clinton supporter. This was actress-turned-activist Rose McGowan, who temporarily lost access to her account in 2017 for posting someone’s private phone number. Note that this is an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s rules, so the platform had little choice in this case. The platform does not seem to have suspended a single prominent Clinton supporter based on the substantive content of his or her expressed views. ...

ndeed, it is not difficult to find cases of liberals engaging in speech that appears to cross the line while not being punished for their transgressions. This includes the case of Sarah Jeong. After she was hired as an editorial writer for The New York Times, it was discovered that over the years she had posted dozens of messages expressing hatred and contempt of whites. When conservative activist Candace Owens copied some of Jeong’s tweets and replaced the word “white” with “Jewish,” she was suspended from the platform. ...

Interestingly, if you search “Sarah Jeong” in Google, you get no auto-complete suggestions regarding her controversial tweets, despite this being the source of considerable infamy. On Bing and Yahoo!, “Sarah Jeong racist” is the first offered search suggestion when her name is typed in. While one could argue that individuals’ worst moments shouldn’t follow them around forever, it is difficult to imagine a big tech company suppressing unflattering information about a conservative in a similar manner. ...

Left-wing activists on college campus regularly engage in the practice of de-platforming—including the use of violence or the threat thereof as a means to prevent someone from speaking. Victims of this practice typically are conservative figures such as Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter. At Berkley, when Milo Yiannopoulos tried to give a speech, a large mob threw stones and fireworks at police officers, and attacked members of the crowd. Around the same time, commentators noted that during the 2016 president campaign, when Bernie Sanders visited Liberty University, the evangelical institution run be Jerry Falwell, Jr., his message was met with “polite skepticism.” ...

It is unthinkable that we would allow a telephone or electricity company to prevent those on one side of the political aisle from using its services. Why would we allow social media companies to do the same?

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1   🎂 Tenpoundbass   2020 May 29, 11:12am  

Yup you go to the beach or park with your kid, the swat team will show up.
But the Antifa are free to agitate and shit stir a destructive riot and burn and loot an entire city down, while the cocksuckers stand back and revel in pride at their accomplishments.
2   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 May 29, 11:25am  

Helpful tips: Insult with Middle English. Call people Codpieces and Slatterns.

Try to get them to insult you, or threaten you, and report.

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