from the what-a-mess dept
So... remember a couple weeks ago when I wrote about a House Judiciary Committee in which the supposedly "free market / free speech" supporting Republicans on the Committee were grilling private companies about how they need to be regulated as utilities to stifle free speech? Well, not surprisingly, the whole situation has gotten much worse and much, much stupider. It started, of course, with a bit of pretty bad reporting by a Vice reporter named Alex Thompson, who wrote an article incorrectly claiming that Twitter was "shadowbanning" Republicans.
Shadowbanning, of course, is the well known moderation technique in which certain sites allow certain users to think they're participating, but really making it so that no one else can see their contributions. It's been shown to be fairly effective against trolls. Either way, Thompson's report was wrong on multiple levels -- which was disappointing. Vice has a whole separate site called Motherboard, which has some of the best tech reporters in the business, who likely could have set Thompson straight and prevented the company from running such a misleading story, but that did not happen. First of all, Twitter was not shadowbanning anyone. The issue at hand was that for some users, if you searched on their names, those accounts did not show up in the autocomplete. That's it. If you clicked return at the end of your search, the accounts still showed up. If you followed the users, you still saw their tweets. It was not shadowbanning by any stretch of the imagination.
Also, the issue was not partisan, even in the slightest, contrary to Thompson's reporting. As others showed, the failure to show certain users in autocomplete was impacting a bunch of people and not just Republicans. Indeed, Twitter admitted that there was a bug in its autocomplete feature which impacted hundreds of thousands of accounts including plenty of people in both major political parties. Twitter fixed this relatively quickly. Thompson's article at Vice is still not corrected. Instead, it has a note claiming that Twitter is "no longer limit[ing] the visibility of some prominent Republicans," which implies, completely falsely, that it was targeting Republicans.
But, alas, partisan stupidity is like no other stupidity, and this bad and incorrect story first got picked up by the President, who tweeted (of course) that Twitter was shadowbanning prominent Republicans -- even though it was not.
And, from there we were off to the races. Rep. Devin Nunes, picked up the story and claimed that he was considering taking legal action against Twitter. This is stupid on so many levels. First of all, if Twitter were actually moderating its platform in this manner, it has every legal right to do so. And, as we noted about that hearing earlier this month, it's very bizarre to see supposedly "free speech / free market" Republicans suddenly arguing for heavy regulation of both speech and industry. Second, there is absolutely no legal basis for any kind of legal action. It would get laughed out of court. Third, and again, this is kind of important, Twitter wasn't discriminating against Republicans and wasn't shadowbanning them. You would think that a Congressional Representative, preparing to take legal action against a company, would at least take the time to understand what happened.
And, he wasn't the only one. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was the star of our post about the Judiciary Committee hearing for being beyond wrong in claiming that Section 230 and the First Amendment are in conflict -- and also flat out misrepresenting what Twitter's representative said on the panel concerning Twitter's First Amendment rights -- has apparently filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about Twitter. The details are scarce, but when appearing on Fox News late last week, Gaetz said the following:
I’m certain there were only four members of Congress who had their voices suppressed on Twitter: Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan Mark Meadows, and Devin Nunes. That would be one hell of a coincidence. My suspicion is that if people were effectively communicating a conservative message, they got caught in Twitter’s troll trap. The reason that I think that is illegal is because it gives advantages to our political opponents. It gives them access to the platform that we don’t have.
If Twitter was a billboard company and they gave Democrats access to their billboards and not Republicans, that would be an illegal corporate donation to the campaigns of Democrats. Here, instead of the billboard, it’s the auto fill-in function that’s a part of Twitter’s search feature that wasn’t available to me, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows or Jim Jorden. And it’s available to Democrats.
Except, again, that's not at all what happened. There was no suppression. There was no shadowbanning. There was no targeting of Republicans. There was no targeting conservative messaging. There was no "illegal corporate donation." This is all grandstanding nonsense, that may play well to a certain set of very angry people, but has no basis in reality.
In the end, everyone comes out of this looking bad. Vice and Alex Thompson should post a correction to their article and apologize for what misleading crap it was. Trump should never have tweeted the nonsense, but you know that's not going to stop him. But Nunes and Gaetz certainly don't need to enable and further this nonsense, though, again, that appears to be well within their character. However, for politicians bleating on about fake news, it seems notable that they seem to be contributing to the spread of it. Of course, the real end game here is an attempt to effectively block Twitter, Facebook and Google from trying to improve the nature of discourse on their platforms. In short, this is a trollish effort to force platforms to allow trolling. It's phony outrage that should be ignored, but it won't be, because so much effort has been put into a totally fake claim that conservatives are somehow being targeted that platforms have to bend over backwards to make sure that anything they do to improve their platforms doesn't accidentally impact someone in conservative circles.
In the end, don't trust everything that you read online, and, for once, try to elect people who aren't ignorant, grandstanding morons.
Filed Under: content moderation, devin nunes, donald trump, grandstanding, matt gaetz, politicians, reporting, shadowbanning, social media
Companies: twitter
