Will we ever know the full story behind Twitter’s favoritism and bans? Maybe not, but Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss are helping the public to see at least a bit of it. On today’s Editors episode, MBD tells listeners how Twitter’s shadow-banning affected him personally.
“Twitter created a kind of private extreme definition of what shadow-banning would be, which would be that no one could find your tweets if they searched for them on Twitter. But what most people meant by it was that there was some kind of mechanism or limitation that prevented people who chose to follow you from seeing [your] tweets. I’m even getting messages this morning saying, ‘You know, I’m seeing your tweets on my timeline for the first time in years, and I’ve been following you the whole time.’”
The powers that be (or used to be) at Twitter seemed to have their own set of rules, and as Michael stresses, “the rules that they had were constantly interpreted in a way that favored progressives and disfavored conservatives, and partly because many liberals I think genuinely believe that common conservative beliefs — common human beliefs — are harmful.”
Charlie has been beating the drum on transparency for some time now, and is quick to remind listeners of this fact. “The two things that irritate me here as a user are that Twitter had this completely opaque byzantine system for putting its thumb on the scales according to whichever fads came along or the personal views of their employees, dressed up, of course, in neutral language about safety, and denied it.” Yes, there is a fine line when it comes to private companies, and Charlie covers this as well. “I will say it until I’m blue in the face. It is a private company. It can do what it wants. Thank you to the First Amendment, but as a user, I would like to know what it’s doing, and I certainly don’t want it to lie to me. There is actually a point at which businesses are not, under American law, permitted to lie about what they’re doing to their consumers.”
What else irritates him? Progressive journalists. Specifically, “the speed with which many, perhaps most progressive journalists have moved from, ‘This wasn’t happening,’ ‘This is a conservative conspiracy theory,’ ‘This is whining,’ to, ‘Well yes, of course it was happening, and it was good.’ Pick one.”
Our panelists also consider the news of WNBA player Brittney Griner’s release from Russian prison, weighing in on the difficulties of the whole terrible situation. For all of this and more, listen below.