Freedom and Fulfilment

Personal Development, Spirituality & Psychedelics

Why is Twitter Censoring Free Speech?

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There has been a disturbing trend of increasing censorship against free speech on Twitter. This comes not from radicals or extremists on the platform but from Twitter itself. Needless to say the increased Twitter censorship is unsettling.

Twitter’s new safety policies

On Tuesday Twitter Safety made an announcement about new policies rolling out in the coming weeks.

“We stand for freedom of expression and people being able to see all sides of any topic. That’s put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices. We won’t tolerate it and we’re launching new efforts to stop it.”

This makes no sense, as users on an egalitarian platform don’t have the capacity to “stifle and silence” one another. Everyone stands on equal ground. The only actor with the power to silence users is Twitter themselves, and that is, seemingly, exactly what they are doing.

“Today, we’re announcing three changes: stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, bringing forward safer search results, and collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.”

More vaguery and Orwellian doublespeak. People’s concern here is that this is not about safety or protecting the integrity of the platform, but rather Twitter pushing its own ideological agenda.

The problem with censorship

The problem with censorship is always the same: who gets to decide?

Who gets to decide what’s acceptable and what’s to be censored? Who gets to decide what constitutes “abuse”? Who gets to decide when a search result is too “unsafe” or “sensitive” for you to see?

Others are calling attention to this issue. Click the tweet below to read the replies of Twitter users themselves.

Mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein saw this trend coming back in November 2016.

These development have led to tweets like the following:

Users are increasingly calling for a decentralized, censorship-free platform.

Is Twitter “shadowbanning” users with dissenting opinions?

There have also been allegations that Twitter “shadowbans” users who hold dissenting opinions. To shadowban is to secretly suppress the visibility of an account and its content, without informing the user or their followers that anything has changed.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams was likely shadowbanned late last year due to his ongoing commentary on the US presidential election.

Twitter bans journalists but verifies violent extremist groups

Despite the supposed concerns about safety, Twitter continues to allow accounts like that of Islami Chhatrashibir, the student wing of a Bangladeshi Islamist group who are linked to terrorist organizations and known to kill free thinkers and cut the tendons of their political rivals.

https://twitter.com/rayhana/status/829112836538380289

Twitter (now famously) banned Milo Yiannopolous, a journalist, while assigning groups like this and the Muslim Brotherhood “Verified” status on their platform.

With a track record like this, can Twitter really be trusted to curate our content for us?

Does Twitter manipulate “trends on Twitter”?

Gizmodo reported last year that Facebook manipulates the “trending” module on its homepage to influence the content users see. Former Facebook employees admitted to removing political news that was counter to the narrative Facebook wants to enforce and “injecting” stories that align with Facebook’s political views.

Given what we know, how surprising would it be if there is something similar happening with trends on Twitter?

Why did Twitter suspend competitor platform Gab?

Twitter recently suspended the account of Gab, a competitor micro-blogging platform created in response to censorship and built around the idea of free speech.

Only after the issue received media attention did Twitter restore Gab’s account.

Free speech is non-negotiable

Twitter has long been seen as a democratizing force and a revolutionary technology in the truest sense. Its role in the Arab Spring demonstrated how technology can create positive social change on a large scale.

But that was over six years ago. Today Twitter wants to enforce murky censorship policies and crack down on the free speech of its own users for holding differing opinions.

And while it is political tension that has brought the issue of censorship to the fore, free speech goes far beyond partisan politics. The free exchange of ideas is a process uniquely responsible for determining the future of technology and society and it is one that we must protect at all costs.

If this trend towards censorship on Twitter continues, I predict the emergence of one or more viable alternatives and a mass exodus of content creators, free thinkers and influencers away from the platform. Only time will tell, but things are not looking good for Twitter.