Conservatives May have Just Won Another Culture War Battle
Conservative may have just won another battle in the culture war as many people are reporting that their QFD shadow bans have been lifted. While it is possible that the lift is not political it was an issue being decried by mostly conservative voices with many people on the left saying it was a conspiracy theory and not really happening. So why did Twitter remove the bans and does it have anything to do with Jack Dorsey testifying before congress in just a few days?
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Conservatives may have just won a major battle in online censorship, because many people are reporting now that their shadow bans on Twitter have been lifted.
Now, if you were to ask the mainstream media or someone on the left, are conservatives being shadow banned, they'll probably tell you it's a conspiracy, it's not really happening.
But we know this is happening for a fact, because Vice News actually covered the story, and many of us have actually seen the evidence.
Not too long ago, Vice reported that several prominent Republicans were not appearing in search results, but their Democratic counterparts were.
And Twitter says it was just a mistake, and they fixed it.
But whether or not Twitter is actually trying to censor conservatives, or just targeting behavior as they claim, doesn't really matter.
Twitter says they don't look at the content of people's tweets when they decide whether or not to ban them.
That's actually not true, because we know for a fact that Twitter polices hate speech.
Which means if they're going to ban someone based on the context of what they say, they do have to look at it.
So this seems like an incorrect statement coming from Twitter.
But, Twitter also says they just ban behavior.
And if that's true, then maybe the behaviors they don't like, as a left-leaning company, are more associated with conservatives.
Thus, they may be inadvertently banning conservatives just because they are biased.
But why are people claiming now that their bans have been lifted?
Well, there's a service that allows you to test whether or not you're shadow banned.
And many people are saying they're no longer shadow banned, plain and simple.
What's interesting about this is that Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, is set to testify to Congress about whether or not they're censoring conservatives.
And just a few days before that happens, these bans all get lifted.
I have to wonder why they would do it.
Maybe it's because Jack doesn't want to have to lie when he says that certain people are banned for their politics, so they just decided to lift the bans on personalities.
Now, while a lot of people are saying that all shadow bans have been lifted, they haven't been, because some certainly still exist, and I'm going to run through those tests today with you.
But first, let's take a look at what's going on with Jack Dorsey having to testify to Congress.
From CNET, Twitter's Dorsey to testify before House Committee.
Watch live, September 5th.
Round 2 of Silicon Valley's House hearings is just around the corner.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will speak before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee following his testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence earlier in the day.
Unlike his solo testimony in the House, Dorsey will appear before the Senate along with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and potentially Google Parent Alphabet's media-shy CEO Larry Page.
The House committee's title for the hearing is Twitter, Transparency and Accountability, which suggests it'll revolve around the debate over whether Silicon Valley companies based in the historically liberal San Francisco Bay Area are censoring conservative voices.
Earlier in August, for example, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and other tech firms banned the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and much of his InfoWars online publication from their services after he touched off harassment campaigns aimed at mass shooting victims and their families.
President Donald Trump has also spoken on the issue using a hashtag.
Now before moving on, I want to point out that statement is factually incorrect.
We don't know exactly why Alex Jones was banned, but he was banned by all these companies around the exact same time.
So if they're claiming it was because he was engaging in hate speech or harassment, why would they all do it at the same time?
Your guess is as good as mine.
But what we do know is that the rules they claim Alex Jones violated were from a while back, and had nothing to do with his conspiracy theories.
That's their actual statements.
People are claiming that he was spreading misinformation about Sandy Hook, but the social media platform says it wasn't anything to do with that.
It was just hate speech and incitement.
The committee is also likely to discuss Russian interference in U.S.
elections, an issue that the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to discuss earlier in the day.
The Senate committee is still investigating Russia's efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, but tech companies have also identified and shut down hundreds of accounts attempting to interfere with the U.S.
midterm elections being held November 6th.
I find that the media, major media companies, are lazy, inept, they're terrible at their jobs.
Some of these people are liars.
They have activist agendas and they'll lie.
But it really does seem like some of these people don't even do simple Google searches before writing these articles.
In a story from The Next Web, Brian Clark says, no, Twitter isn't shadow banning conservative voices, here's what's really going on.
And I'm highlighting the story as one of many that just doesn't seem to understand what is actually happening.
He starts by saying, He highlights this tweet,
And he says, The hop-up started last night when Alex Thompson framed a
story perhaps as poorly as any journalist could possibly frame a story.
Thompson, the politics editor at Vice News, stated falsely that Twitter was shadowbanning prominent conservative voices.
Mentioned specifically were a Donald Trump Jr.
spokesman and Republican National Committee chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel.
In Thompson's assessment, Republicans were being silenced by Twitter after several prominent figureheads no longer appeared in the auto-populated dropdown of the search feature.
Right after claiming this isn't true, he goes on to explain that Twitter has an issue with its search feature.
This much, it admitted.
But even the users mentioned in the Vice News piece were getting likes, comments, and retweets for every post.
Simply put, this most definitely was not a shadow ban.
Nobody's voice was being silenced.
Thompson did discover the search issue, perhaps the only morsel of truth in an otherwise disastrous piece.
So, in other words, the story about how prominent Republicans were not appearing in search that he claimed was mostly false, he admits was actually true.
He then goes on to say you can choose not to believe the company, and many will, but ask yourself, what reason does it have to shadow ban conservatives?
Conservatives moving their conversations to Twitter are arguably the single greatest growth tool in the platform's recent history.
Trump, essentially, is the goose that laid the golden egg.
Twitter itself later clarified the issue, stating it was a problem derived from recent changes designed to drive healthy conversation on the platform.
It reiterated that these changes didn't single out conservatives and affected all users equally according to head of product Kayvon Bakepour.
Our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets, he told BuzzFeed News.
Multiple Twitter users also took Thompson to task, like Huffington Post reporter Ashley Feinberg who posted multiple images of the issue affecting prominent liberals as well.
Mike Isaac of the New York Times took issue with the framing of the story as one that silenced only conservatives.
So his story wasn't wrong.
They just don't like that he didn't tell more of a story, and this is common in media.
They do the same thing on their own websites.
They'll talk about how, say, Antifa only goes after neo-Nazis and omit the fact that Antifa has been known to beat progressives as well, just recently in Portland.
And I don't want to get too much into that.
The point I'm bringing up is that everyone is seemingly partisan, but the reality is most people can only report on a simple aspect of something going on.
The reporter from Vice News found that, yes, prominent Republicans were being censored.
Does it matter that liberals and people that are Democrats are being censored too?
Of course it does.
But just because he focused on these people that he found doesn't mean the story was wrong.
What do you expect him to do?
Sit there and try and find as many liberals as possible to make sure the story is balanced?
That's not necessarily feasible.
And this is one of the problems we have with media.
Simply because he didn't know that something else was happening doesn't mean that what he was highlighting wasn't true.
And then we take into consideration what they're talking about with healthy conversations.
If Twitter is going to ban prominent people within the RNC because they want to promote healthy conversations, then we have to recognize that what Twitter views as a healthy conversation might not include Republicans.
Obviously, the issue does affect liberals as well.
But when we see the Proud Boys get banned, and then Antifa doesn't, you have to realize that Twitter is heavily focused on policing certain things and not others.
And this is common for people who work in Silicon Valley.
They get their news from the mainstream media, they're not focused on journalism, and these journalists don't know how to do Google searches, so people are often just being inundated with false information.
And right now, people are claiming that all shadow bans have been lifted.
But that's not necessarily true, but people think it is, simply because many prominent people did have their shadow bans lifted.
This tweet from Sarah Eaglesfield has been going around, and I've seen a lot of people mention it and ask me about it.
She says, I don't want to brag, but I believe Twitter has today removed all QFD bans.
That's a shadow ban.
If you were shadow banned by the quality filter, please check your handle and hit me back, running at 100% on test.
You can thank real Alex Jones.
So in order to test this, I did a search for people who were shadowbanned, and I found this user, David Vance.
He says, Lots of people asking me what the red cross in my profile
is about.
It's about me stating that I have a Twitter QFD shadowban.
To check if you too have one, go here and enter your Twitter handle, shadowban.eu.
If you are shadowbanned, insert a red cross into your Twitter handle.
So just about a month ago, this user said he did a search and found he was shadowbanned.
So I did a check on his Twitter handle today and found that he has no shadowban.
And apparently there's a lot of people claiming that their bans have been lifted, but Twitter didn't outright just lift all bans because I did a search on some accounts that look like bots and found that, yes, the bans still exist.
Now I don't want to outright accuse this Twitter account of being a bot, but their account doesn't look very active and they have a search ban.
They couldn't be tested for threads because they don't tweet enough, but they do have a search ban from QFD as well as General Search.
So shadow bans still exist, but it seems that people who are just personalities have had their bans lifted.
And I have to imagine that this is because Twitter is set to testify in front of Congress.
Here's the thing.
Twitter is an admitted left-leaning company.
So there's probably things they don't think are healthy, from their liberal, leftist bubble perspective.
So when they see conservatives engaging in certain behaviors, they might say, oh, it's not because they're conservative, it's because we don't like their behavior, not realizing.
that they are targeting a group of people who engage in a certain type of behavior.
Now, many people might say this is trolling, but it's not necessarily.
A lot of people who are shadowbanned aren't trolls.
And aren't trolling, they just have bad opinions.
And thus, Twitter shadowbans them because they want healthy conversation.
So Twitter can honestly claim, we don't target people because they're conservative, just their behaviors.
But if those behaviors are mostly associated with conservatives, you are removing certain people from public discourse.
But there's actually a much simpler example of bias.
Let's look at Ben Shapiro.
He'll have no problem telling you there's only two genders, and he wouldn't use someone's preferred pronoun.
But in many ways, that can be considered hate speech.
It's actually against the rules of most of these platforms to disparage people because they're trans because of their identity or gender.
In which case, having the conservative opinion that you don't believe trans people are actually, you know, gender dysphoric, or that you think there's only two genders, could be considered hate speech, and you'll find yourself banned.
That is a political opinion.
It is.
And you might not like it, and it might go against your ethics as someone on the left, but people who are conservative believe it to be true, and they vote based on these principles, and if they're banned because of it, then that is a bias.
So, let me know what you think in the comments below.
Do you think this is because Twitter is set to testify before Congress, or is it just Twitter Caving in and saying, you know what?
You guys were right.
We're going to lift these bans.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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