VICE News Backs Up What Big League Reported Last Week: Conservative Censorship on Twitter is REAL

On Wednesday, a report from the left-of-center VICE News concluded that Twitter has been shadowbanning conservative accounts, but Big League Politics covered this just last week in not one, but two separate articles.

In the first, I tackled what some call just another conspiracy theory, and in the second, I presented how you can tell if your account is being shadowbanned, and what you can do to try to stop the censorship.

Twitter’s Censorship of Conservatives Can No Longer Be Denied

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Think Your Account Is Being Shadowbanned On Twitter? Test It Out

In Vice’s article by reporter Alex Thompson, he concluded that Twitter is indeed hiding accounts from certain high-profile conservatives, and that high-profile liberal accounts are not getting the same treatment.

Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.–VICE News

VICE specifically mentions Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman and the Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, as one of several high-profile conservative or republican accounts that no longer appear when you use the Twitter auto-populated drop-down search box. It goes on to say that if you use the visible drop-down bar, the accounts do not appear. They only become visible when using a full search.

In a statement to VICE News, McDaniel states “The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American.” She continued, “Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on.”

A spokesperson from Twitter said:

“We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.” Asked why only conservative Republicans appear to be affected and not liberal Democrats, the spokesperson wrote: “I’d emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”

The spokesperson from Twitter then cited a blog post from May 15th that explained the company’s new approach to “troll-like behaviors.”

Gizmodo reported earlier this week on the fact that journalist Mike Cernovich was also being shadowbanned, and was not visible in the drop-down search box, only in the full search.

Conservatives both in and out of Congress have been claiming that not just Twitter, but also Facebook and Google have been censoring their accounts for months now, with varying amounts of evidence. With Diamond and Silk attending one hearing to argue that Facebook had intentionally diminished the amount of people and interactions they were receiving on their account. The second hearing late last week included representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter, and several conservative congressman pushed the social-media giants for answers.

A spokesman for Congressman Gaetz told VICE News, “It is curious that these allegations would arise the week following Congressman Gaetz’s heated exchange with Twitter senior executives before the House Judiciary Committee.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California told VICE News in a statement, “This type of opaque behavior by social media companies is exactly why conservatives are speaking out and demanding more transparency and accountability.” He added, “The bias has to stop.”

With the midterm elections just around the corner, can conservatives count on their content being visible to the public, or will the social-media giants intensify their censorship?