Censoring Conservatives Is a Political Move, It's On Purpose
There have been several instances where conservatives have mimicked tweets from liberals and been banned for it. Why does Twitter allow some speech and not others?Why do activists, who dont follow conservatives and even had them blocked, want them to be banned entirely? Its odd isn't it? If they and their friends can't see the content what is the issue?The issue is that these ideas can influence others and they don't want people to be able to hear what conservatives have to say. Plain and Simple.Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Yesterday, we saw the Proud Boys purged from Twitter.
That includes their founder, Gavin McInnes, who is a high-profile Trump supporter, co-founder of Vice, with something like 265,000 Twitter followers.
We saw H3H3, a massive mainstream YouTuber, get a guideline strike because he was talking about Alex Jones.
He was actually showing Alex Jones' content, which is probably what happened.
Within a few hours, they reversed the strike and apologized, but the system is in place to go after specific content.
And it's hard to wonder why.
Now, admittedly, my view is limited.
I try to make sure that everything I do is balanced, well-researched, but I'm wrong.
You know, I could be wrong.
I don't think I know everything.
But based on what I've seen over the past couple years, the reactions to certain people on the left and the right, and what's going on with echo chambers and bubbles, I have to assume that this does primarily target conservatives, and I think I know why many activists want that to be the case.
So today, the question I have is why are they calling for censorship of certain ideas when they can block and ban people and they do?
If so many people on the left frequently use block lists on Twitter, why then do they advocate for certain people to be removed from a platform if they already can't see them?
And I've got an idea, and that's what we're gonna get into.
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First, to understand why I think this does primarily affect conservatives, we're going to look at a few stories.
This story is from 2016.
It reads, Conservative writer posts same tweet as Ghostbusters
actress to see if Twitter has bias.
See what happened.
A conservative writer was briefly banned from Twitter on Monday after posting the exact
message word for word as a liberal actress who was never punished for her tweet.
Campus Reform contributor Cassie Dillon tweeted to Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones something
that Jones herself tweeted more than a year ago.
Jones said, and you and your friends are bigots.
If you don't like me, why the F do you watch, let alone contact me?
And then encourages them to commit a violent acts against themselves.
I try to be careful because we know how these platforms work.
I'm not going to repeat this because I don't want to get banned.
The article then highlights this tweet from Mikhail Baylin.
He says, And here is the first post from Leslie Jones.
said to see if Twitter has bias and gets suspended.
And here is the first post from Leslie Jones, and then when we pop over to the next photo,
word for word identical.
Yet Cassie Dillon was suspended.
After other users found out, the hashtag FreeCassie started trending.
Eventually, Dillon was allowed back on Twitter.
And there's more.
This story's recent, from only a few days ago.
Candace Owens mimics New York Times' Sarah Jong gets suspended by Twitter.
Saying white people are BS won't get you banned on Twitter, but saying Jewish people are Well, that's what happened to conservative activist Candace Owens, who was suspended from Twitter for mimicking the racist tweets of new New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jung.
Despite her tweet explicitly saying it was a parody of someone else's tweet, that got her a note from Twitter saying that your account has been locked for violating the Twitter rules, specifically for violating our rules against hateful conduct.
And then we have this more extreme example from the Amazing Atheist from just a couple days ago, and there's a reason I'm putting them in this order, which I'll explain in a second.
But Amazing Atheist was banned from Twitter.
He received a suspension after he made derogatory statements about white people.
He then added, so New York Times, how about a lucrative job at your paper?
I think I have demonstrated the qualifications.
Clearly this was meant to satirize or make a point about what Sarah John was saying, and Amazing Atheist is not a conservative, but it's kind of about a certain idea, and that certain people are sort of getting away with these things.
The tweet from Cassie Dillon, the first one I showed you, she used verbatim language.
I think the reason why they didn't suspend Leslie Jones is that she's famous and they want to avoid PR backlash.
She's a big movie star.
They're gonna give her more leeway than some smaller user like Cassie Dillon.
The second post was from Candace Owens, and she changed the word white to Jewish.
So now the language is changing, but she's trying to make a point about racism.
That regardless of what race you put in there, it's racist.
And sure enough, she was suspended as well.
The third example, TJ Kirk, the Amazing Atheist, he went really extreme.
So much so that I'm actually worried about showing what he said, because it is much more extreme than what Sarah Jung actually said.
But again, he was making a point about vile rhetoric and racism, and he was suspended as well.
So Twitter will suspend certain people.
It seems like whether it's automated or not, they will suspend a user.
In the instance of Cassie Dillon, I have to imagine that wasn't automated because she used verbatim language that Leslie Jones uses, unless Twitter has a behind-the-scenes algorithm that grants protections and leeway to celebrities, which I really don't think is the case.
So if users can block anybody, if they can mute anybody and the left, does employ block lists to just mass block people they've
never interacted with, why then are they trying to advocate for banning certain
users that they don't engage with in the first place?
The only thing that's going to do is restrict regular folks and the uninitiated from engaging with various ideas.
I have to think that's the reason why.
The New York Times did a story just the other day about Twitter's fight to control what is happening on their
platform.
The story, inside Twitter's struggle over what gets banned.
It starts by saying, With his arms folded, Jack Dorsey paced back and forth in a conference room at Twitter's headquarters on Friday afternoon.
In a rare look inside one of the social media company's policy meetings, the Twitter chief executive gathered with 18 colleagues, including the safety team, to debate ways to make the social media service safer for its users.
The discussion quickly turned to how to rid the site of dehumanizing speech, even if it did not violate Twitter's rules, which forbid direct threats of violence and some forms of hate speech, but do not prohibit deception or misinformation.
Twitter asked that members of its safety team not be identified for fear of them becoming targeted by internet trolls.
Please bear with me, said one team member at the meeting.
This is incredibly complex.
For about an hour, the group tried to get a handle on what constituted dehumanizing speech.
At one point, Mr. Dorsey wondered if there was a technology solution.
There was no agreement on the answer.
I want to make sure we highlight this portion before moving on.
The discussion quickly turned to how to rid the site of dehumanizing speech, even if it did not violate Twitter's rules.
Why would Twitter want to get rid of speech if it doesn't violate their rules?
I don't think the answer is advertisers.
Now, a lot of people are saying, look, these are private platforms.
They don't have to host your speech if they don't want to, and that's true.
And I do think, obviously, the people who run these companies have a political bias.
But some people have talked about the adpocalypse.
You know, YouTube wants to curtail some of this more extreme speech because advertisers don't want to appear on that content.
But advertisers appear in their own posts on Twitter.
No matter who you are, you might see a promoted tweet directly from the brand.
So it's not necessarily about stopping advertisers from appearing alongside extremism, because no matter who someone follows, they're going to see an ad from the advertiser, not from some kooky extremist.
The other issue is, What is dehumanizing speech?
Do people really agree on what that is?
And if not, is it going to be up to a small group of around 19 people in San Francisco to determine what is or is not allowed in the public sphere?
Twitter is a private platform.
I get that.
And they can ban whoever they want.
But I recognize there's a huge problem, if you follow my channel we've talked about this, when our public discourse and political debate happens on a private platform that determines what you can or cannot say.
San Francisco is a bubble.
It is a very blue area, to say the least, right?
It's a very left-leaning urban center, so they're going to lean far left.
Even if they think they're being rational, they're probably still on the fringes of the far left.
They're not centrists.
They don't interact or engage with conservatives very often, I would imagine.
And I do think that Jack Dorsey is trying.
I've looked at who he follows, and in the story they talk about how he's reading books on free expression.
But let's look at what happened with Patreon, when they banned Lauren Southern.
Jack Conte released a video talking about refugee rescue missions, and right away, based on the language he uses, I can tell that his position is a far-left position.
And I don't mean regular left, I mean he's getting his information from far-left sources.
The UNHCR, which is one of the best sources you can use when talking about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, referred to the people entering Europe through the Mediterranean as economic migrants and not refugees.
They drew a distinction between the bulk of those entering Europe as economic migrants and the minority coming from the eastern Mediterranean route who were refugees.
When someone says that everyone coming in through Libya is a refugee, But the UNHCR, the actual official mainstream news reporting, like what the New York Times would say, is that they're migrants.
You can tell that Jack Conte is getting his information from left-wing and far-left sources, and that's going to shape his narrative.
Thus, when he thinks he's being reasonable banning Lawrence Southern, His information is coming from biased sources, and in reality, he's actually not being too reasonable.
Again, he can get rid of Lauren Southern, and there is an argument to be made for Lauren Southern getting on a boat in the Mediterranean and, you know, waving her flare in the air and trying to block one of these boats, but the argument he made was coming from biased information.
I imagine that the same is going to be true for Jack Conte.
He's probably looking at all these positions and thinking he is being moderate, when in reality, he's in a bubble.
And he's probably getting his information from biased sources.
Because yes, even large mainstream sources like the New York Times are biased.
Especially when the New York Times is going to protect Sarah Jong and defend her hire, but fire someone like Quinn Norton.
Now I want to add just a quick note, Quinn Norton has defended the New York Times for keeping Sarah Zhang on.
But suffice it to say, they took action against one person and not against another.
And there's a lot of people who believe that's because they are biased.
I think if you were to ask me, the New York Times leans the left, The Wall Street Journal leans a little to the right, but overwhelmingly, they're decent sources.
Although I have to admit, I really don't like the double standard.
So let's talk about why many of these people want to see Alex Jones and the Proud Boys band, even though they've blocked them already.
Think about what that means.
These are people who don't interact with Alex Jones.
They don't watch his content.
They don't interact with the Proud Boys.
They just don't like them.
And they really don't want people to hear what they have to say.
If Twitter is going to ban someone or try to remove language that doesn't violate its rules, that's a political action.
That is activism.
If they set up rules and say, you can't do this, and then someone does something that doesn't violate the rules and they say, you know what, we're going to ban you anyway, it seems to me the reason for that is to restrict those ideas which are totally acceptable on their platform and not a violation of the rules from reaching the ears of people who are paying attention.
The people on the far left who use block lists are not listening.
So why do they care if these people are saying these things?
They talk about protecting marginalized communities.
But if these marginalized communities and their allies have already blocked these individuals, then what are they worried about?
This content's not going to dehumanize them.
They can't hear it.
If they have the option to mute or block, then what else does Twitter need to do?
Why ban someone who isn't breaking the rules?
The whole thing sounds just very strange to me.
But then we think about it politically.
There are a lot of people who are in the middle, and they're going to be swayed left or right.
And yes, there are extremist voices on the left, and there are extremist voices on the right, both trying to convince the normies to join them.
If you only restrict one side, then the far left is free to recruit.
When I look at conservatives, they absolutely reject far right.
And what I mean by far right is more of the right as in traditionalism and the left as in progressivism.
The left and the right can be nebulous terms at some times.
But when we look at what people often colloquially refer to as far-right, they kind of mean authoritarianism and traditionalism.
And when you look at the far-left, you get authoritarianism and progressivism, right?
Communists want to break down all of the structures of society and reform them equally.
They want to get rid of the tradition.
And the far-right want strong traditions.
They want women in the home and things like that.
And that's where you get this sort of identitarian divide.
When the Proud Boys were banned, people asked, are they now going to ban Antifa?
I understand that Antifa just means anti-fascist, right?
It could refer to anybody who opposes fascism.
In that sense, everyone, for the most part, is anti-fascist, except for a very small group of fringe weirdos who are literal fascists that nobody likes.
But Antifa has a flag.
They have a symbol.
They fly that symbol.
And it represents a group that has been referred to by the Department of Homeland Security as a terrorist organization.
They called it domestic terror.
Will Twitter then get rid of the fringe far-left elements that engage in political violence in the streets?
I have to think the answer is no.
And as of shooting this video, they haven't.
So what are we left with?
There is an extreme traditionalist, an extreme right, white supremacists, white nationalists.
There is the extreme left, communists, authoritarians, Antifa.
They're both on the fringe trying to convince regular people to believe them.
Twitter wants to get rid of dehumanizing language, even if it doesn't violate their rules.
And what we've seen, at least in my experience with the articles I've shown you, is that conservatives face the brunt even when they use identical language.
So then we can see more fringe elements of the right fall off.
But the far left keeps doing what they do.
Sarah Jeong, for years, can attack white people with racist tweets, and Twitter doesn't remove that.
Those posts are absolutely dehumanizing.
But why is it, then, that the conservative, who mimics that language, is suspended, and the woman who does it for years gets a job at the New York Times?
To me, it says that there's absolutely bias on the platform.
Twitter wants to act like, no, they don't censor people based on their politics, but I think the evidence speaks to the contrary.
The Proud Boys were banned, and a spokesperson said it was because they violated their rules on extremist groups.
Okay, if you want to ban the Proud Boys because some of them did participate in Unite the Right, because Jason Kessler was a Proud Boy, and because the Proud Boys have been at violent rallies, we all saw the video from Portland where the fights broke out, then I would ask you why Antifa hasn't been banned either.
Again, Antifa is kind of a general term, but they do have a flag.
They have a symbol.
They have a loose organization, a loose structure.
And there are cells that operate as groups, such as Rose City Antifa.
This is a group with their own emblem, their own individual logo.
Why, then, does Twitter not ban them?
They're an extremist group that engages in political violence.
Because it would seem that Twitter does ban people based on politics.
And I'm rather shocked that people think that's not the case.
I look at Antifa as almost as far left as you can go.
There actually have been times where Antifa has attacked democratic socialists for being too close to liberals.
They've written on the walls in Berkeley, there was spray paint graffiti that said liberals get the bullet too.
You can't go any more authoritarian left than that.
So here we see a group that people refer to as far-right, not alt-right, but they are Western chauvinists and traditionalists, getting removed for participation in rallies that have turned violent.
But Antifa, that also participates on the other side of that violence, and is about as extreme as you can go, flying Stalinist flags in Portland, is totally fine.
It would seem, in my opinion, that Jack Dorsey and the Twitter staff are biased in favor of the left and just don't realize it.
They probably think they're doing a good job being moderate because they're not communists, but still target conservative voices, thinking that's far right.
And thus, more fringe elements, like actual white nationalists, are still on the platform, but Gavin McInnes has been removed.
The only thing I can see is that the people on the left want to make sure you don't have the choice.
You aren't allowed to hear what these people have to say, and that is very troublesome.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
This is just my thoughts and my argument on the matter, and I could be wrong, and there could be things that I'm missing, so let me know if you think I'm right.
Let me know if you think I'm wrong, and yeah, comment below.
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