Media outlets downplay Twitter shadowbanning of conservatives
December 12, 2022
The Twitter Files Part II have just been released, and both Business Insider and Forbes are saying that everyone already knew this.
The revelation is that Twitter did “shadow ban” certain accounts. Limit who could see their tweets and deliberately restrict their dissemination across the system. As will not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention it was predominantly conservative accounts and personalities who were treated this way. Censorship of views is inconvenient to the liberals who ran Twitter and largely run the American media that is.
A good measure of how far this rot has spread, this liberal and progressive bias, is in who is defending the former Twitter practices now. For example, Business Insider reports that “The “Twitter Files” part two on Thursday claimed to “reveal” a “secret” operation” – those parentheses being there to show that it’s all just silly children inventing the problem. The next part is “ but Twitter’s practice of hiding some tweets hasn’t been a secret at all.” So, as we say, the defense is that everyone has known this all along. As Insider goes on, this is good, that conservatives be kept out of the digital town square.
Forbes works along much the same lines: “Twitter built “secret blacklists” and ran a clandestine operation to cut the visibility of targeted tweets, accounts and topics, according to the second tranche of Elon Musk’s hyped “Twitter Files” released on Thursday, framing widely known and widely acknowledged practices as revelations.” Again, the insistence is that it’s no big thing and even should have been done. Oh, and everyone knew anyway.
Bloomberg manages to go even further with this headline: “Musk Twitter Leak Raises Concern About Outside Data Access”. Not even concerned about political censorship but worrying instead about who got to see the internal documents? A nice bit of deflection – we might call that the other kid who ran away defence.
For years there have been those allegations that Twitter – and possibly other platforms – deliberately muted conservative voices. Now that this is revealed to be true we’re told it was already known, it’s fine and nothing to see here. That’s deflection amounting to misinformation of course.
Bloomberg ranks at No. 32 for news and media outlets. It gains 74 million visits a month from that position. Much more important, it also runs the basic information system that the financial markets run on. Forbes ranks at 22, has some 102 million visits. Business Insider is at 21 with 97 million visits (visits are not the only measure of ranking).
That all three are major financial media outlets is where the real problem is. That some fringe progressive site tries to argue this way is just what we would expect. But when three major pillars of the supposedly politically neutral business press come out with this same nonsense we’ve an insight into just how biased the media is. The business press is arguing that it’s just fine to censor conservatives?