(PatrioticPost.com)- Twitter is facing growing criticism after it decided to go against its own promise of being impartial and label tweets made by President Donald Trump as “inaccurate.” The social media giant attached a label to tweets published by the president which expressed concern about the possibility of voter fraud in states that are allowing mail-in voting.
As a result, President Donald Trump announced that he would sign an executive order that strips liability protection from social media companies that fail to be impartial. Now is as good a time as any, therefore, to remember back in 2018 when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that his company had failed to be impartial.
During a Congressional hearing, CEO stated that Twitter does represent a digital “public square” and that his company had unfairly removed over 600,000 accounts from search results. Known as “shadow banning,” over half a million people were affected by Twitter’s decision to make it difficult to find accounts that they didn’t approve of. It took a lot of grilling, but Dorsey eventually admitted that what they did was wrong and it breached their “intended impartiality.”
I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who question the “intended” part!
Dorsey wasn’t the only representative of big tech companies to appear before a Congressional hearing over matters of impartiality, either. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has done exactly the same thing and so has Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google owns YouTube, the video social media platform, which has also been accused of silencing conservative voices.
During a hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Twitter CEO Dorsey said that he did consider Twitter to be a “public square” but made the case for censoring some content. However, the very fact that Dorsey called his platform a “public square” means that First Amendment rights apply. Under the constitution, the stipulations of the First Amendment, which guarantee free speech, apply whether or not a public square is privately owned.
Dorsey claimed that his platform was promoting “conversational health” which, in their mind, means people get to have better conversations. In reality, it means some people are censored and some aren’t.
President Donald Trump signed the new executive order on Thursday night. Time will tell whether Dorsey will once again admit wrongdoing or simply double down.
