MSNBC’s Ari Melber is worried that Twitter could put its thumb on the scales in elections and not be very transparent about its policies. It would be a profound insight…if he had made it back in 2017.
“You could secretly ban one party’s candidate…secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until AFTER the election.”
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 26, 2022
“You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” Melber said. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidates or all of its candidates, all of its nominees. Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”
Oh, the horror! Can you imagine what it would be like if our social media companies operated this way?
Melber, like every other panic pundit on MSNBC and other liberal networks, is deeply concerned that Elon Musk will turn Twitter into the monster he just described. But to be more precise, he is concerned that Twitter will become the conservative version of it. He seems unaware that Twitter and Facebook have already been operating this way on behalf of liberals for years.
Twitter’s vague policies regarding “hateful conduct” have been wielded against conservative pundits and politicians without any transparency. Meanwhile, the platform allows Chinese and Iranian officials to post far more hateful material and even threats of violence with impunity.
Twitter and Facebook suppressed a politically damaging story about candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter right before the 2020 election, even locking the New York Post out of its account for weeks over a story that turned out to be completely accurate. Twitter erroneously claimed the story contained “hacked materials” and that those were banned from the site. Yet Twitter was happy to promote stories with hacked materials when it served the political goals of liberals.
And Twitter already did, in fact, “turn down the reach” of GOP politicians while boosting other accounts. Twitter has admitted that its algorithms that reduce account visibility for accounts based on hateful “account behavior” were responsible for shadow-banning Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz. As Vice reported at the time, Democratic politicians, including McDaniel’s Democratic National Committee counterpart and the entire liberal caucus, were not affected.
Twitter and Facebook have operated for years in the manner Melber described, but he didn’t notice because they were part of his team. Now, Musk buying Twitter is a five-alarm fire because pundits like Melber think his support for free speech is all a ploy to do to them what Twitter did to their opponents for years.
