Think of Jack Dorsey as the tech industry Anthony Fauci: Sure, he may have left his most visible position, but you can expect to see his face on Capitol Hill a lot.
So, as you likely know, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44 billion. Now, he’s having a fire sale: Everything must go! Employees! (Except Ligma and Johnson, of course.) Free lunches! Expensive espresso machines! Fancy chairs! And, yes, all of the censorship that had secretly been stuffed in the closet under the ancien régime!
Over the past two weeks, several journalists have been publishing what have come to be called the “Twitter Files” — internal documents released by Musk and reviewed by the journalists regarding how the social media platform handled censorship and moderation.
Of particular note — at least as far as Dorsey’s lawyers are concerned — was a document dump Thursday by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss which confirmed that, yes, Virginia, there really was shadow banning and it really was being used against conservative figures.
As Dictionary.com defines it, shadow banning is “a practice used in online moderation that consists of preventing a user’s content from being seen by others — either partially or totally — without the user being notified or aware of it.” Twitter swore it wasn’t happening, especially not to conservative figures — and the establishment media was happy enough to play along.
Then came Weiss’ revelations, which shot that all to heck.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Among those who received shadow bans in one form or another included COVID lockdown critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, conservative radio host Dan Bongino and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.” pic.twitter.com/dOyQIVdsW2
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Now, here comes the problem: Four years ago, Jack Dorsey testified before Congress that no inordinate shadow banning of conservative figures was occurring.
In his opening remarks at the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in September 2018, then-chair Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican, noted that “in July, it was reported that some politically prominent users were no longer appearing as auto-populated options in certain search results.”
“This led to concerns that the service might be, quote, unquote, ‘shadow banning’ some users in an attempt to limit their visibility on the site,” Walden said.
“Now, this was hardly the first instance of a social media service taking actions which appeared to minimize or de-emphasize certain viewpoints, and in the most recent case, Twitter has stated that the actions were not intentional but, rather, the result of algorithms designed to maintain a more civil tone on the site.”
Later in the hearing, Democrat Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania gave Dorsey a chance to set the record straight.
“I think it’s important for people to understand — you know, the premise of this whole hearing and the reason that Twitter somehow, with all the other social media platforms out there, got the singular honor to sit in front of this committee is because there is some implication that your site is trying to censor conservative voices on your platform,” an exasperated Doyle said, not without a hint of sarcasm.
“Now, when you tried to explain the shadow banning — as I understand it — you had a system where if people who were following people had some behaviors, that was the trigger that allowed — that caused you to do the shadow banning,” he continued.
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“So you were really like an equal opportunity shadow banner, right? You didn’t just shadow ban four conservative Republicans. You shadow banned 600,000 people across your entire platform, across the globe who had people following them that had certain behaviors that caused you to downgrade them coming up. Is that correct?”
“Correct,” Dorsey responded.
“So this was never targeted at conservative Republicans. This was targeted to a group of 600,000 people because of the people who followed them, and then you determined that wasn’t fair, and you corrected that practice,” Doyle said. “Is that correct?”
“Correct,” Dorsey responded, again.
“So just for the record, since you have been singled out as a social media platform before this committee, Twitter undertook no behavior to selectively censor conservative Republicans or conservative voices on your platform,” Doyle said. “Is that correct?
Again: “Correct.”
“Good. So let the record reflect that because that’s the whole reason supposedly we’re here, because House Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote our chairman a letter and said, ‘Hey, this is going on and we think your committee should investigate it,’ and it’s a load of crap,” Doyle said.
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This is one area in which the Democrats have become more efficient, and perhaps the only one: They’ve now reduced the time it takes for a “load of crap” conspiracy theory to become accepted fact to just over four years.
Granted, this wouldn’t be possible without the deus ex machina of Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which opened the floodgates on how shadow banning worked and how it was being applied in accordance with the company’s left-wing principles.
Take, for instance, how the account Libs of TikTok has been treated by the Twitter censors:
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” See here: pic.twitter.com/d9FGhrnQFE
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Then, compare it to tweets that doxed the woman behind the Libs of TikTok account:
22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up. pic.twitter.com/tUeaBP1bS4
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Now, granted, this happened after Dorsey’s testimony, but it’s consistent with how the platform has acted in the past — only then, we couldn’t see exactly what was going on behind the scenes. Now we know.
The question is, how much did @jack know about who was getting shadow-banned, and when did he know it?
If he knew enough to know these practices were ongoing and tended to target conservative accounts, this is called lying to Congress. It’s a crime, and it’s why the aforementioned Dr. Fauci might be in a bit of hot water over his insistence that the United States wasn’t funding gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Like the aforementioned Fauci, however, it might be difficult to prove much, considering the term “shadow banning” could be considered as legally fungible as the term “gain-of-function.” It’d be nice to see Dorsey fighting this one in court, but that’s more likely to happen in my dreams than in the legal system.
That said, add Rep. Mike Doyle to the plethora of useful idiots that believed shadow-banning was just “a load of crap.” At the very least, it’s nice to see a blowhard retroactively beclown himself with the same nothing-to-see-here assurance the whole Democratic machine assumed when conservatives started taking a serious look under the social media moderation hood during the Trump years.
We were right, and they were fools.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
