Twitter says they didn’t do it, but Conservatives aren’t buying what the social media giant is saying, holding firm to the claim that social media in general has a bias against those who have Conservative values.
Vice News reported earlier in the week that Twitter’s practice called “shadow banning” is a real thing, and then reported the next day that the platform said they had discontinued doing it. Shadow banning was first applied, as a concept, to Reddit, where posts could only be read by the individual who posted it and by no one else; the posts were banned from the general readership but weren’t entirely removed, existing as if a shadow. Several Conservatives, including President Trump, complained that Twitter was making it difficult to perform a search for some of the most prominent Republicans, and adopted the term for their use.
Matt Philbin, Managing Editor for Newsbusters says it’s a threat. “This is very damaging. It’s very damaging to free speech, and to the idea of free speech. It’s very damaging to the idea of free and open access to the internet.”
Vice News claimed that accounts including Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel, and Congressman Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows did not appear in the auto-populated drop-down search bar.
“The tech companies are, by and large, outwardly liberal start-to-finish. They’re not friendly to Conservatives,” says Philbin. But he says not to let that dissuade you from using social media platforms. “Keep at it. That’s all I would say. We need to be here. We cannot afford to abandon these platforms to the Left. We’ve abandoned popular culture to the Left and its hurt us greatly.”