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Twitter is taking censorship to a brand new level.
Censorship on social media is getting worse, especially at Twitter. Case in point, look at the tweet below. Twitter has deemed it misinformation, despite the credentials of the person saying it. What’s worse, unless you take a picture of the tweet (as I did) or link directly to it, you cannot reply, share or like it. In other words, it is prohibited from going viral. So, likely you would not even hear about it. Eventually, I imagine, it will be deleted. Sigh.
This brings to mind a few question. First, who fact-checked this post? Presumably, only an expert can counter the argument of another expert, otherwise you just have an uninformed opinion attacking an informed one. That doesn’t make sense; unless you are Twitter.
Revolver analyzed Twitter’s fact checking policy when it comes to Big Pharma and characterized Twitter as “Shameless Shills for Big Pharma.” Click here for a fact-based but wholly sarcastic rebuke. The point of Revolver’s argument was that Twitter was more interested in protecting a narrative than fact-checking. But, I digress.
If politics is more important than free expression, it makes sense then who is leading Twitter’s fact-checking efforts. His name is Yoel Roth and he has been under fire before for incendiary tweets against Republicans. Here is one such example.
By the way, I checked Roth’s LinkedIn profile for evidence of expertise in epidemiology or other vaccine related sciences. I did not see it. Just FYI.
Republicans took notice of Twitter’s bias and openly complained about it. According to the NY Post…
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Conway ripped Twitter Wednesday for having Roth in the post-policing position.
“I think if you run a company like Twitter you’d probably first look at what that individual would put out on Twitter themselves,” McCarthy told reporters outside the Capitol in reference to Roth.
“I do not think somebody who would think Republicans are racist, label those who are in the Republican Party equal to people who [are] in the Nazi Party…I’m not quite sure that’s the person I would have being the individual in charge of Twitter determining whether the facts are correct or not, because I think he already is biased in that opinion,” McCarthy said.
Twitter should boot Roth out of his position, said McCarthy, who noted that he’s “concerned about who they have doing a fact check.”
Conway also waded into the issue Wednesday, saying that Twitter fact checks are carried out by the same “people who attack him all day long.”
The Daily Mail did an expose on Yoel Roth as well. Here is a quote from them…
The head of Twitter’s fact-checking team has previously tweeted that the Trump administration are Nazis, compared adviser Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels and said fly over states are racist.
Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, faced backlash on Wednesday after his history of anti-Trump tweets emerged less than 24 hours after the social media giant put a fact-checking warning on two of the president’s tweets.
So, with that kind of personal bias in charge of fact-checks, no wonder Twitter opposes contrary viewpoints. To be fair though, is it all the fault of one man? No, there is an entire community of people like him patrolling Twitter to keep the wrong opinions and unfortunate facts at bay. That community is called Birdwatch and it was launched back in January 2021. Check out the video below for insight into how it works.
I’ve talked about social media “fact checkers” before and to put it bluntly, I am not a fan.
To see so much coordinated effort to silence free speech is disheartening and my initial reaction is to abandon Twitter and spend more time with Gettr. But, I think I will do both. Eventually Twitter will cancel my account due to wrongthink and having a backup elsewhere is just smart. On the other hand, if Birdwatch is set up to police the wrong opinions (i.e. Conservative thought) maybe I should get involved and counter-argue the left so that at the very least different opinions are heard and (hopefully) respected. Maybe we all should?
Hmm… Yes, let’s all do that.
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