Rita Panahi: Twitter needs to be treated like a real publisher
While Twitter cracks down on US President Trump, it allows the Iranian regime to spew its lies and fails to fact-check Chinese government propagandists who are allowed tweet crazy COVID-19 conspiracy theories, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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If Twitter wants to behave like a publisher then it should be treated like one. It can’t pretend to be a neutral platform when it exerts editorial control including selective “fact checking”, shadow-banning and other underhanded forms of censorship that are almost always targeted at conservatives.
This week Twitter unwisely picked a fight with its most powerful account holder, US President Donald Trump.
For reasons that defy logic they picked Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots and voter fraud to label with a “fact-check” linking to a highly partisan CNN piece.
As Sohrab Ahmari noted in the New York Post the dubious fact-check Twitter directed users to was “the kind of opinion-masquerading-as-reportage that CNN, and too many other mainstream outlets, specialise in.
“Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the story tsk-tsk’d — the experts apparently having forgotten the debacle of thousands of lost, missing and uncounted mail-in ballots reported by The New York Times last month.
Trump then tweeted a number of times about the platform “stifling free speech” and the need for big tech to clean up its act.
“Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!” Trump posted.
“Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election. If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen! They tried hard in 2016, and lost. Now they are going absolutely CRAZY. Stay Tuned!!!”
On Thursday we learned the action will come in the form of an executive order.
We’ll know on Friday the details and whether it’s bluster to appease some of the Republican base or something more substantive.
The early speculation is the order will target Google and social media platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from being held accountable for the content their users post.
As it stands a handful of social media giants have a virtual monopoly on the flow of information and speech in the public square.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google and Silicon Valley’s Left-leaning ways have been well documented and the subject of senate hearings.
Take Twitter’s head of site integrity Yoel Roth, who is in charge of developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules and was a key part of the site’s “fact-checking” policies. Here is a man who posts deranged diatribes against Trump and Republicans being tasked with determining what is truthful.
Who is going to fact check some of Roth’s tweets including his claims that there are “actual Nazis in the White House” and likening Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda.
To label Roth anti-Trump doesn’t do his deep loathing justice. This is a young man so overcome with hatred for conservatives he maligns anyone who votes differently to him.
After the last election he posted: “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
Yes, I’m sure we can trust Roth and his like-minded colleagues to treat conservatives who they slander as racists and Nazis fairly.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday posted a series of self-serving, contradictory tweets where he claimed the site wasn’t “an arbiter of truth” but would “continue to point out incorrect or disputed information”.
Conservatives and libertarians have become accustomed to having their content demonetised on YouTube, ranked low on Google searches and suppressed or censored on Twitter and Facebook.
The double standards in policing speech on Twitter is evident in the way conservatives are banned for “infractions” that don’t seem to apply to Leftist account holders who can spew all sorts of defamatory abuse and threats. “Misgendering” a dude with a full beard who identifies as a pixie will see you suspended but any abuse of conservatives is considered fair game.
And, in the parallel universe Twitter often inhabits if you are not proudly Left then you are considered “alt-Right” or “virtually a Nazi”.
While Twitter targets Trump it allows the Iranian regime to spew its lies on the platform even though Twitter is banned in the Islamic Republic. Twitter has also failed to fact check Chinese government propagandists including deputy director of the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs information department, Lijian Zhao, who tweeted that COVID-19 originated in the US and plenty of other batshit-crazy conspiracy theories.
You don’t need to be on Twitter to be subjected to the platform’s enormous influence. Just about every media player, commentator and journalist is on Twitter and what happens on the site has an enormous influence on what you see highlighted on the mainstream and new media.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist