GOP Rep. Gaetz Threatens to Drop the Hammer on Twitter For Shadow Banning Conservatives. Here's What He's Doing.
Rep. Matt Gaetz is contemplating filing a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Election Commission over the alleged shadow banning of conservative accounts, which suppresses the views of the right in favor of the ideas espoused by progressives on the left, preventing their ideas from being seen by the masses.
While both Facebook and Twitter are private companies and as such, have the right to decide what kind of content is allowed on their platforms, the situation involving social media is made more complicated by the fact that these organizations are now key players in the flow of information and news in America.
Gaetz was one of several prominent conservatives, including members of Congress and the chair of the Republican National Committee, whose accounts Twitter suppressed by making it harder to find in the site’s search function, a Vice News investigation published Wednesday found.
Advertisement - story continues below“Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” the report concluded, noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.”
Twitter announced in May that the company would rely on “behavior-based signals” to boost the visibility of some accounts and to suppress the visibility of others as part of a step “to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter.”
“The evidence is piling up that I am being treated differently on Twitter than people on the political Left and I don’t like that because I enjoy the Twitter platform, I enjoy the engagement, I enjoy the candor,” Gaetz told TheDCNF.
“I would think that having won my election with 69 percent of the vote to serve in the Congress that the marketplace of ideas could accommodate my views,” he continued.
Advertisement - story continues below“I am contemplating a complaint with the FEC, because if my political opponents have better access to the Twitter platform than I do, that’s no different than a private company giving my political opponents access to a billboard or television time or radio time,” Gaetz said. “That wouldn’t be equal.”
“So I believe that Twitter may have illegally donated to the campaigns of my opponents by prejudicing against my content,” he said.
Again, this is tricky water to navigate. You don’t want to tell a private business entity they have to do something or else, because that’s a leftist tactic. At the same time, social media companies, particularly large ones, play a huge role in the dissemination of information in the digital age we live in, so what are we to do?
Let’s hope some sort of solution is figured out here soon.
Source: Daily Caller
