Wednesday was a busy day for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who testified not once but twice on Capitol Hill—first before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the subject of foreign meddling in elections, then before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the subject of bias allegations against Twitter. Conservatives are likely more interested in the subject of the second hearing, bearing as it did on whether the social media platform is deliberately suppressing right-wing or Republican views.
A variety of conservatives, right-wing radicals, and Republican politicos have alleged that Twitter diminishes the influence of conservative accounts. The most common way in which this is supposed to occur is by “shadow-banning,” i.e. by Twitter’s algorithmic method of giving some tweets more prominence than others. This is shadow-distinguished from ordinary banning, i.e. suspending or expelling accounts that either aren’t real people—“bots”—or that repeatedly engage in abusive or offensive conduct. (The controversy over shadow-banning led one woman to stand up and shout, in the manner of protesters at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, that Twitter is trying to exclude conservative viewpoints—whereupon Rep. Billy Long, a former auctioneer, launched into an auctioneering routine, apparently in order to drown out the protester’s hectoring. Though irrelevant, it was the highlight of hearing.)
On the narrow subject of shadow-banning, Dorsey explained that a technical glitch kept some accounts from appearing in auto-complete search results. That glitch affected some 600,000 accounts and seems to have resulted in their showing up less often in users’ Twitter feeds. Dorsey did not know how many of them were those of prominent Republicans, but one gathered from his remarks that most were Republican-leaning accounts.
The hearing, as such hearings often do, strongly suggested that members of Congress have a distorted understanding of the government’s role in the private sector. Many of the committee’s Democrats peppered Dorsey with questions about “cyber-bullying” and other anti-social online behavior on Twitter—as if it’s the role of Congress to ensure that people aren’t obnoxious and cruel to each other in online forums. Some of the committee’s Republicans, meanwhile, seemed to believe that Twitter has some statutory duty to give as much online visibility to conservatives and Republicans as it does to liberals and Democrats. But of course the company has no such duty.
We can’t say for sure if Twitter’s algorithms and content monitors do or don’t unfairly penalize some right-of-center users for their opinions. On the one hand, it’s a West Coast-based, left-of-center company; one would naturally expect that predisposition to emerge somewhere in the implementation of company policies. On the other, Twitter’s corporate leadership and shareholders want to make money; they therefore have an incentive, not just to refrain from offending the rightward-leaning half of their users, but also to make their users’ experience on the platform as pleasant and irritation-free as possible. That means banning trolls and bots and other malevolent accounts as well as promoting the tweets of users who, in the estimation of fallible people, are more likely to be appreciated than others. How to accomplish that end without offending or unfairly penalizing one group or another is probably beyond the ken of even the brightest and most fair-minded Silicon Valley tech engineer.
But surely the paramount question in all this is: Who cares?
Even assuming that Twitter disadvantaged some right-leaning accounts unfairly, we wonder why Republicans believe they’re owed a social media platform that is 100 percent nondiscriminatory in every aspect. They are owed no such thing. If they choose to engage with a social media company run by West Coast techies, conservatives should be prepared to discover that their views are not given equal time with those of their left-wing counterparts.
Yet watching the House committee’s hearing, an unbiased observer might have concluded that equal treatment on Twitter is an inalienable constitutional right. Representative Jeff Duncan, for example, aggressively queried Dorsey about why an unnamed friend of the congressman signed up for a Twitter account and was recommended to follow only liberal and Democratic accounts but not Republican or even celebrity accounts. A fascinating question! But again: Who cares? Duncan’s friend may follow whoever she likes, and the private-sector firm called Twitter.com may suggest she follow whoever its technicians and programmers think she would want to follow.
Whining about ill-treatment from a private company is not a good look for politicos belonging to the party of limited government and individual responsibility. If Congressional Republicans feel so strongly that they’re being slighted by Twitter, they have every right to delete their accounts.
