Daniel Greenfield, a
Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative
journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
How do you
know you’ve been shadowbanned? You may be tweeting, but you’re no longer being
heard. You wonder if maybe people just aren’t interested in what you have to
say.
But they
might be interested. Twitter just isn’t interested in letting them read your messages.
Shadowbanning
is the censorship that social media companies do in the shadows. It’s cowardly
and dishonest. And it’s how the big firms get away with covertly censoring
conservatives.
"The
idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been
banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content," Abhinav
Vadrevu, a former Twitter employee, explains in Project
Veritas' undercover investigation of the company.
“They just
think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is
seeing it.”
Shadowbanning
is the perfect metaphor for the big lie of social media. The big companies
claim to empower you while they actually take away your voice. And they do it
without you realizing it.
Or as
Olinda Hassan, Twitter’s Policy Manager for Trust and Safety put it, “It's
something we're working on where we're trying to get the s___ people not to
show up.”
Social
media has duplicated the media’s hypocritical claims of transparency and
fairness. Facebook and Twitter claim that they aren’t media companies. But they
act just like them.
And with
these videos, James O’Keefe pivots from hammering the media to
exposing social media.
"Twitter
was probably about 90% anti-Trump, maybe 99%," Mo Norai, a former Content
Review Agent, revealed. And censorship was subjective. Anti-Trump employees
felt free to censor pro-Trump messages. Twitter doesn’t run on definitive
rules, but on unwritten codes and biases.
And
Twitter’s unwritten code was to censor the right and favor the left.
As
the James Damore lawsuit against Google
revealed, this monolithic mindset is achieved at big tech firms by a strategy
of intimidation and scapegoating. The shutdown of conservatives at companies
like Google and Twitter begins on the inside, and then when control has been
consolidated, goes outside.
There’s a
direct line between Google’s suppression of conservatives within the company
and its smears of conservative sites. The same tactics that were used to smear
conservative employees at Google are being aimed at conservative sites by
Google. Shadowbanning is just a high tech version of shunning. And there’s a
direct line between shunning conservatives at work and working to shun
conservative users.
On the
video, Norai reveals that there were, “A lot of unwritten rules.”
"We're
in San Francisco, we're in California, a very liberal, a very blue state,” he
explained. "As a company, you can't really say because it would make you
look bad, but behind closed doors are a lot of rules."
The
unwritten rules, like shadowbanning, are how the censorship sausage gets made.
The big online companies that control search and social media pretend to be one
thing, but are really another. The unwritten rules are part of a secret world
that outsiders rarely get to hear about. Just as the Damore lawsuit exposed the
hidden corporate culture at Google, the Veritas videos reveal the truth about
Twitter.
Pranay
Singh, a Twitter engineer admitted, that accounts are suspended sometimes for
political reasons.
"Do
you get requests from the government to take down celebrities?" a Project
Veritas journalist asks.
"Oh,
all the f____ time," he replies.
The
conversation also reveals just how out of touch the tech industry is with the
rest of the country.
"Just
go to a random (Trump) tweet and just look at the followers. They'll all be
like, guns, God, 'Merica, like, and with the American flag, and, like, the
cross,” Singh spouts. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure
a bot.”
Algorithms
are used to flag and delete accounts that Twitter employees think are bots. And
Twitter employees live in such a leftist bubble that they think that patriots
don’t really exist.
"You
look for Trump, or America, or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to
describe a redneck,” the engineer explains. A majority of the algorithms, he
admits, target Republicans.
"So
you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?" he's asked.
"Yeah,"
he replies.
Tech
companies start out by purging conservatives from their ranks. And then they
set out to purge all conservatives. When a corporate culture has no room for
intellectual diversity, then its staffers start to believer that people who
think differently don’t even exist. Or shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
That’s the
state of mind that totalitarian societies induce. And the Project Veritas
videos reveal how well Twitter has succeeded. The 1% of conservatives at
Twitter have learned to keep their mouths shut. Censorship at Twitter follows
the political biases of the overwhelming majority of employees.
And while
Twitter is a private company, it also has a great deal of power over the
national discourse.
President
Trump has boosted Twitter’s influence, but as the Project Veritas videos
reveal, the company and its employees are deeply hostile to him. The company
hasn’t found the courage to delete Trump’s account, but its employees clearly
fantasize about the idea, one even went so far as to try and do it, and they
eagerly shadowban, censor, harass and delete the Twitter accounts of Trump
supporters.
Some of the
Twitter censorship measures revealed by the Project Veritas videos were
occasioned by the media’s claims that a ‘fake news’ conspiracy resulted in
Trump’s victory. But others are purely a matter of bias. And between the push
to purge social media of ‘fake news’ and political biases, conservatives are an
endangered species on social media. Much as they’re all but extinct in the
mainstream media.
But social
media was meant to be different. Instead of being told what to read, watch and
hear, you would set your own agenda. Anyone could create and share content. The
media was done. Instead of having your morning or afternoon defined by CBS or
CNN, it would be built around your interests.
And that
was a lie.
The
internet makes that possible. But the big search and social companies decide
what you see. The same way that Netflix pushes Black Mirror: Twitter, Facebook
and Google push their results. But the old mainstream media companies never
tried to fool anyone into thinking they were democracies. You were going to
watch what CNN wanted you to. And that was that.
Social
media pretends to be a viral democracy. But its corporate overlords run it like
a tyranny. Twitter, Facebook and Google are built on lie. They aren’t
meritocracies of content. The game is rigged. And these videos pull back the
curtain to show some of the men and women doing the rigging.
Have you
been shadowbanned yet? Give it time and the people in this video will get
around to it.
