Twitter, Google show clear bias against Donald Trump
Under pressure from liberal critics, Twitter put a clamp on President Trump and free speech, proving it’s just as left-leaning as the bulk of the media.
All good media organisations insist they take their responsibility for truth-telling very seriously. A glimpse at the rigour and fairness of their output, or the way leading figures from news organisations diligently ask straight questions of political figures rather than delivering little performative expressions of outrage, is surely all the evidence we need of their efforts to pursue the truth.
Big US news platforms take the issue so seriously that they have teams of fact-checkers rooting out every trace of falsehood. Earlier this year, Twitter, the media platform beloved of politicians, media folk and others, intensified its efforts to ensure no one should be misled by anything on its site. It introduced features that would flag certain content as false or disputed.
On Tuesday, the company applied the rule for the first time to a pair of tweets by Donald Trump that alleged there would be widespread fraud in the use of absentee ballots, an increasingly hot topic in this Covid-19 dominated election year.
We all know Mr Trump can be a little inventive with the facts, so no doubt many people cheered. But it was striking that of the millions of tweets by politicians posted that day Twitter sought to highlight only these two.
You might like to know who presides over this rigorous process. The “head of site integrity” at Twitter is a man named Yoel Roth. The Ivy League-educated Mr Roth has a PhD in communications so he must know his stuff. Not long ago he was quite an eager tweeter himself. Here’s the kind of stuff he used to write: “We fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason”, ” ‘Today on Meet The Press we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days’. Whatever I hear when Kellyanne [Conway, President Trump’s strategist] is on a news show”. There are many in similar vein.
More revealing than Mr Roth’s thoughts about politics is the way his team now “fact check” statements by the president. Among their primary sources for setting the record straight are news organisations such as CNN. You might not be familiar with the recent performance of CNN but it has become a standard bearer for the “resistance” to President Trump.
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
The Radical Left Lamestream Media, together with their partner, the Do Nothing Democrats, are trying to spread a new narrative that President Trump was slow in reacting to Covid 19. Wrong, I was very fast, even doing the Ban on China long before anybody thought necessary!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
It’s easy to dismiss this latest piece of twittery as the sort of media manipulation that most people can see through. With the ubiquity of searches on Google News and social media like Facebook and Twitter, the ever-encroaching bias of TV and newspapers might not seem to matter that much. These new platforms are for many people the main source of information. Politicians have become adept at using the new media to get their message across to the public, unfiltered by the distorting lens of editorial decision-making.
We saw how traditional media howled at this intrusion on their turf. Their ludicrous claims that Facebook was responsible for the election of Mr Trump and the Brexit vote were a turning point for many.
Now we have plentiful evidence that the same bias that distorts so much of the traditional media is being replicated, in a much more powerful way, by the tech giants.
Under pressure from liberal critics to ban or block supposedly misleading content, Facebook has so far commendably resisted on the grounds that it’s not the domain of a private company to decide, beyond evidently offensive or dangerous content, what the public should be allowed to see. But this month the company established an outside panel of “experts” to review content. The panel included one or two conservative voices, but of course a much larger number were those of a traditional media viewpoint.
Google insists it conveys no bias in its search results but there’s growing evidence this isn’t true. Last year Greg Coppola, a former Google engineer, left the company after going public with claims of widespread bias in its search results. He pointed out that, in a routine news search, the lion’s share of results come from left-leaning sources. The single largest provider of results in the US was - surprise - CNN, closely followed by similar-minded news outlets. In the UK, the BBC and The Guardian dominate search results.
This followed a study by Robert Epstein, a professor of psychology and a Hillary Clinton supporter, that found Google search results for Mrs Clinton tended to produce a much higher proportion of favourable items about the candidate in 2016 than was the case for Mr Trump.
Earlier this month the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, wrote a detailed blog post titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” about the web’s most sought after source of information on a vast range of topics. Mr Sanger pointed out that the entries for the Trump and Obama administration were heavily politically skewed, along with entries on everything from drug legalisation to abortion and even Jesus Christ.
You may not like what Mr Trump says. This week, he revived a conspiracy theory involving the sudden death of a woman who worked for Joe Scarborough, a Republican congressman turned Trump media critic. You may think Mr Trump lies more than other politicians, but it’s not unreasonable to ask that the same standards applied to him by Twitter, Google and elsewhere should be applied to his opponents.
Big tech dominates our information flow like nothing else. The technology they’ve developed has the ability to enable a diversity of voices on the full range of political, cultural and other issues. But instead those companies are moving to ensure that their platforms are dominated by the same narrow selection of voices that dominate most of the rest of the media.
The Times
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