Twitter’s Selective Punishment

On Tuesday morning, Twitter added “Fact Checks” to two of President Trump’s tweets.

….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

The Fact Check directs to stories from CNN, the Washington Post, and other anti-Trump media that claim “mail in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”

In fact, there have been several recent stories about voter fraud and problems with mail-in voting. Two days ago, West Virginia charged a Postal Service employee with changing the party affiliations on absentee voter requests. Montgomery County in Pennsylvania recently sent 2,000 voters the wrong ballots for a primary next week. Last week, a former judge of elections and Democratic committeeman from Philadelphia pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent votes.

Breitbart reported that about 16.4 million mail-in ballots went “missing” in the 2016 and 2018 elections. Government Accountability Institute Research Director Eric Eggers said last week that Detroit has at least 30,000 more registered voters on its rolls than eligible voters. In early 2019, after fighting to conceal the information, Pennsylvania’s government admitted that 11,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in the state.

Perhaps “rigged election” is too strong a term, but voter fraud is a real concern. If the lists of registered voters are wrong, obviously mail-in voting will make it easy to commit fraud. Nonetheless, Twitter is telling the American people that the President of the United States is wrong.

This is political bias, but it is not incitement to violence. Twitter’s treatment of the situation in Minneapolis is arguably worse.

Rioters have destroyed several buildings in Minneapolis over the last three nights, ostensibly to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. The situation is still tense and dangerous situation. Minneapolis was 94 percent white in 1970, but today, it has a slim white majority of 60 percent. Many neighborhoods look like the Third World.

In this climate, misinformation can kill. Nonetheless, tweets that a white officer involved in the arrest was wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” hat quickly spread across Twitter, some from verified accounts.

Here is Derek Chauvin, the racist cop who kept his knee on #GeorgeFloyd’s neck, cut off his air passage and murdered him, wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” hat, a clear sign that this piece of excrement should’ve been taken off the streets a long time ago.#JusticeForFloyd pic.twitter.com/KxGxHAIzlH

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) May 27, 2020

A wolf in wolves clothing. The demons are among us. #Fightthecowards pic.twitter.com/UYw7zXNabQ

— Ice Cube (@icecube) May 27, 2020

Some Twitter users also think “Make Whites Great Again” was trending because “racists” are hijacking Twitter.

Of course, the man in the picture is not the Minneapolis police officer. Even left-leaning Snopes reported this. After letting these photos trend most of the day, Twitter finally said these images were “manipulated media,” but the tweets from verified accounts remain live. The people promoting this disinformation have not lost their checkmark or their verified accounts.

Many people want to ban “hate speech” because it supposedly encourages violence. However, on Twitter right now, there are people urging more violence, comparing urban riots to the Boston Tea Party.

The boston tea party was a historical moment that we’re taught in school when people rioted and protested against tax on tea. Now people are doing the same over the murder of an unarmed black man and suddenly it’s unethical and unamerican. spot the difference for me.

— 💙 (@cindyktrilogy) May 28, 2020

The Boston Tea Party was a direct rebellion to fuck with British MONEY and acted as a catalyst for change.

It’s 2020 and Target burned down yesterday. This ain’t different. This is the revolution, bitch.

Fuck with the money, fuck with the system.

— CHIKA 🕹 (@oranicuhh) May 28, 2020

How come we’re not taught in school in that the Boston Tea Party was “ghetto” and “uncivilized”?

— Gennette Cordova (@GNCordova) May 28, 2020

There are countless examples from non-verified accounts. Many of those making these posts consider themselves communists, socialists, or anarchists, but unlike us they do not face speech restrictions at the hands of Big Tech or financial processors. They also have the state on their side. There seems to have been only one arrest Wednesday night, a pawn shop owner who allegedly shot a looter. He may be prosecuted. The store was looted after he was arrested.

Twitter is not just politically biased. That’s to be expected. It also allows hate speech against whites, calls for violence, and support for criminal actions. Jared Taylor and American Renaissance can’t have accounts.

President Trump said yesterday that “we will strongly regulate, or close them [social media companies] down,” before social media is allowed to silence conservative voices. However, social media have already silenced conservative voices. Many of Silicon Valley’s most important figures are not shy about their intentions. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook co-founder Duston Moskovitz, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are very openly organizing against the President.

Even if the White House does something effective now, it may be too late. Many of President Trump’s 2016 supporters have been driven offline, their brands and audiences destroyed. Others are so angry with the president’s weakness that they will not back him again. The conservative movement has been mostly silent because its competition — us — is being removed. Ben Shapiro, for example, is in no danger of losing his Twitter account. It’s sad that our highest hope for President Trump at this point is that he will simply restore the free speech rights we had before he took office.

President Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship shows some promise, but several legal experts called it “bluster,” “rhetoric,” and something that is not a “blueprint for anything that is going to happen.” What we need is a forthright declaration that platform access is a civil right and that free speech will be enforced in the “traditional public square.” Instead, we’re getting fluff. Things are so bad that I still feel grateful for President Trump, because even this posturing is better than anything we would get from a President George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. We must organize, raise money, help build alternate platforms, and find our own way out of this mess. President Trump may mean well, but he’s not going to save us.