The fact that Google maintains a pretense of neutrality while cracking down on right-of-center content is particularly dishonest, considering that Google funds, produces, and promotes left-wing propaganda through its “Creators for Change Program.” Google has spent millions of dollars on the program, which gives left-wing YouTubers a boost from the world’s most powerful company. That includes left-wing writer Amani Al-Khatahtbeh. Google described her as “a rising voice in social, religious, and political issues” and noted that “Amani was invited by Michelle Obama to speak at the inaugural U.S. State of Women Summit.” What YouTube didn’t mention is that Amani’s past work includes a video claiming the September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorist attacks were “an inside job.” While YouTube was cracking down on right-wing accounts in the name of fighting conspiracy theories, the company was funding a 9/11 “truther.”54
Subhi Taha, a YouTube-sponsored “Creator for Change role model,” has similarly promoted anti-Israel boycotts. YouTube and Taha collaborated on a video about Palestinian refugees—who turned out to be family friends of Taha—that promoted an outrageously one-sided narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The video stated as fact that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians, while also leaving out any mention of the actions of Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas. In fact, to call the video one-sided would be generous. It was genuine anti-Israel propaganda funded, produced, and promoted by YouTube.
In addition to smearing Israel, YouTube spends money promoting open-borders propaganda. The tech giant partnered with Creators for Change “role model” Yasmany Del Real on a video opposing enforcement of U.S. border laws. “I had the opportunity to visit some migrant centers and heard many different stories but with only one goal: to achieve the American dream,” Del Real says in the video. “Cesar is just one of many who shares the same goal,” he continues, before introducing Cesar: a Guatemalan illegal immigrant with a previous deportation on his record. “I would love for people to have a better sense of compassion towards us immigrants. We truly only want to work and to work hard. Many of us have multiple jobs. We work during the day and evenings,” Cesar says, in Spanish. “Many of us only want temporary work, without aspiring to stay permanently in the U.S.A.,” Cesar adds, unintentionally undermining the narrator’s assertion that every border crosser is only interested in pursuing the American dream and contributing to society. “Cesar is from Guatemala, and this is his second time trying to emigrate to the United States. This time it took him one month to reach the border. Despite the fear and anguish of knowing he could be deported a second time, Cesar remains optimistic,” Del Real explains, as the video cuts to Cesar. “The United States is a beautiful country, it is a great place to find employment,” Cesar says. In the background, a gospel-style singer croons an open-borders anthem: “Forgive me for trespassing on your lands/That’s not an intention of mine/Family and friends we have left behind/Poverty and destitution are my only crime.”
Maybe you agree with those messages; maybe you don’t. That’s not the point. These are the kind of videos you might expect from a left-wing advocacy group or media outlet. They are not the kind of videos that a politically neutral company produces. If Google is going to sponsor and produce left-wing, open-borders content, then they should publicly acknowledge that they’re an ideologically left-wing company that is promoting left-wing narratives. Indeed, that’s what Google is: an ideologically left-leaning company staffed by people who resent the right’s success on its massive video platform and are actively working to counter it. At the end of the day, Google agrees with progressive activists that the political left deserves a built-in advantage on its platform. But that doesn’t stop them from lying about it.
CHAPTER FIVE Twitter’s Free Speech Farce
Twitter punches above its weight class in terms of driving the national debate, compared to Facebook and Google. The latter companies derive their influence from the sheer force of their size. Twitter has a massive number of users in comparison to many other tech platforms, but it’s not nearly as large as Facebook and Google. Twitter has approximately sixty-sixty million active users in the United States every month—roughly half the size of the 2016 presidential electorate.1
What distinguishes Twitter from Facebook is who uses its platform and how they use it. Twitter is upstream of Facebook, in terms of driving the media narrative. In fact, Twitter feeds into pretty much everything else. Stories characterized as “breaking news” on cable networks were “breaking news” on Twitter ten minutes—or sometimes even hours or days—before. Journalists use Twitter to collect basic facts and see how other journalists are covering a story, in addition to promoting their own work. For that reason, Twitter can—and often does—add several layers to the media bubble.
The primary reason President Trump uses Twitter is because it empowers him to drive media narratives in real time. Within thirty seconds of a presidential tweet, journalists are quote-tweeting the latest 280-character missive sent in ALL CAPS from the President of the United States. Ten minutes after Trump hits the send button for a tweet, news organizations have already turned his post into a short blurb with a splashy headline. And ten minutes after that, CNN has already put together a panel of commentators pondering the implications of this Trump tweet about a witch hunt. “I can go bing bing bing… and they put it on and as soon as I tweet it out — this morning on television, Fox — ‘Donald Trump, we have breaking news’ ” Trump once recounted.2
But the phenomenon is not limited solely to Trump—it’s simply a reality of the modern media environment. The quickest way to attract mainstream media attention is to demonstrate that the story is already trending on social media. When something—anything, no matter how dumb—trends nationally on Twitter, it quickly migrates to articles published by national media outlets. If the story itself contains precious little news value, outlets will adopt a news hook along the lines of “X Public Figure Said Y, and Twitter Users Were Not Having It.” A key factor that distinguishes Twitter from Facebook is the nature of the audience its users are attempting to reach. Most Facebook users intend to communicate with friends, not strangers. Twitter is far more impersonal and far less civilized—and that’s its appeal. At its best, Twitter allows individuals to critique and correct media coverage in real time, and even to outflank liberal media outlets when they aren’t covering an issue. The Gosnell trial is a perfect example.
Kermit Gosnell is possibly America’s most prolific mass murderer.3 He’s also among America’s least notorious mass murderers. His atrocities have been buried solely because of his chosen profession: Gosnell is an abortionist. Or rather, he was an abortionist, before he went to prison. He allegedly executed hundreds of fully born infants by snipping their spines outside the womb.4 The details from his trial were horrific.5 Fetal remains were scattered over the clinic.6 The bodies of dead newborns were often left out overnight, one former employee testified. “You knew about it the next day when you opened the door…. Because you could smell it as soon as you opened the door,” she said.7 Another employee, who wasn’t cleared to practice medicine in an abortion clinic but did so anyway, testified: “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Police found full-term babies and body parts—feet in particular—in jars throughout Gosnell’s clinic. Gosnell was an objectively evil man who, by all accounts, took pleasure in his brutality.8 In one instance, Gosnell reportedly joked about the size of the baby—and he called it a baby—that he was about to murder: “this baby is going to walk me home.”9 But a well-placed snip of Gosnell’s scissors made sure the baby would never walk, would never smile, and would never draw another breath of air.
The Gosnell trial was filled with shocking, nauseating anecdotes about an evil man who preyed upon vulnerable women and defenseless infants. But the same media outlets who have since praised themselves for their bravery in the Trump era and labeled themselves Guardians of Truth, wouldn’t touch the story with a ten-foot scalpel. When the t
rial began, the dozens of courtroom seats reserved for journalists were embarrassingly empty. The story only broke into the national media at all because of the efforts of conservatives on Twitter. A pro-life blogger, J.D. Mullane, snapped a picture of the empty courtroom seats and tweeted it out. The media cover-up sparked outrage. More than 100,000 tweets with the hashtag #Gosnell quickly pushed the story into the national eye, despite the national media’s best efforts. After days of grassroots public shaming, scores of national media outlets sent reporters to cover the trial. That would never have happened without Twitter, as left-wing journalist Dave Weigel, now with the Washington Post, complained in a Slate article.10 (Imagine being a journalist and complaining that people are paying attention to a literal serial killer of newborn infants.)
That’s the power of Twitter—and that’s why the political left is working overtime to control it.
Twitter’s Leftists
If employees’ political donations are any indication, Twitter is staffed almost exclusively by leftists. Individual Twitter employees gave approximately $228,000 to political candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Of that $228,000, ninety-nine percent went to Democratic candidates, an analysis by Recode found.11 Among tech companies, only Netflix had a higher partisan skew among its employees than Twitter. (Recode found that 99.6 percent—100 percent if you’re rounding up—of Netflix employees’ 2018 campaign donations went to Democrats.)
In 2016, the consensus at Twitter was that Trump would get crushed in the general election.12 When that didn’t happen, Twitter employees had a meltdown, blaming their own company. “Twitter helped in promoting Trump,” Twitter engineer Marina Zhao tweeted the day after Trump’s election. She claimed that “Twitter helped in spreading falsehoods and lies.”13 She and her colleagues demanded change, and they’ve gotten it. The fact that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shares their beliefs and is firmly in the left-wing camp certainly aids their efforts. In April 2018, Dorsey promoted an article by tech executive Peter Leyden calling for a left-wing victory in what the author called America’s “second civil war.” Leyden wrote, “In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about fifteen years ago. At some point, one side or the other must win—and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated—nor just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two…. America can’t afford more political paralysis. One side or the other must win. This is a civil war that can be won without firing a shot. But it is a fundamental conflict between two worldviews that must be resolved in short order.”14 Dorsey buys into Leyden’s worldview entirely. He is so completely on board with the culture war that two months later, he issued a public apology for eating at Chick-fil-A.15 He is the Platonic ideal of the Silicon Valley progressive.
The Twitter CEO has worked to distance his company from its former position as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Twitter senior strategist Nick Pickles compared the platform to a “safe space” in July 2018 congressional testimony. “We want to ensure that Twitter continues to be a safe space for our users to share their viewpoints with the broader Twitter community,” said Pickles.16 In a speech to a WIRED25 media summit in October 2018, Dorsey claimed that the “free speech wing” slogan was actually just one big joke. “This quote around ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ was never—was never a mission of the company. It was never a descriptor of the company that we gave ourselves. It was a—it was a joke,” Dorsey insisted to the audience, though of course Twitter had publicly fostered that free speech image for years.17
Dorsey understands that the left’s position on free speech has changed, and as left-wing as Dorsey may be, the people working underneath him are far more extreme. Take Twitter senior manager Ian Brown, for example, who is open about his desire to see Trump—“this motherfucker,” as he referred to the president in one tweet—out of the White House and in jail.18
Twitter launched its Intersectionality, Culture and Diversity Team (ICD) in September 2017,19 signaling its solidarity with the ideological far left, reinforcing intersectionality as the company’s official religion, and priming employees for activism along intersectional lines.
In November 2017, a Twitter contractor on his last day with the company deleted President Trump’s account from the site.20 Twitter scrambled to restore Trump’s account, which went missing for eleven minutes, but it underscored just how much power is at the fingertips of individual employees and contractors.
The Shift
Twitter’s speech policing used to be about fighting harassment and “fake news”; now it focuses on combating “unhealthy conversations.”
Immediately after the election, Twitter banned a slew of members of the so-called “alt-right,” which consists of racist losers and whose national conventions draw about 200 to 300 people—on a good day. For comparison, BronyCon, a convention for male enthusiasts of My Little Pony, draws roughly twenty times that number.21 So the alt-right is an easy target. But, of course, Twitter didn’t care when the alt-right was harassing conservative Jewish journalists. In fact, the alt-right’s number one target for antisemitic abuse on Twitter was Ben Shapiro, according to an analysis from the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League.22 But after Donald Trump’s election Twitter went looking for groups to ban, and it didn’t stop with the alt-right.
Some of its targets were justifiable. For instance, Twitter vice president Colin Crowell announced in June 2017 that Twitter would begin tackling the problem of fake accounts, or “bots,” on the platform. Though the lack of transparency—Crowell insisted that the company’s banning criteria had to remain secret to be effective—was worrying.
Then, in October 2017, Twitter rolled out a new initiative to purge content that “glorifies violence.” Twitter already prohibited “direct violent threats,” “vague violent threats,” and “wishes/hopes of serious physical harm, death, or disease.” But the change came several months after President Trump tweeted a joke video of him supposedly body-slamming CNN, a video that infuriated his journalist critics.
In March 2018, Dorsey pledged a broad overhaul of speech policing on Twitter. He noted that in the past Twitter had focused most of its efforts on removing content that violated the platform’s terms of use. That was no longer enough. Twitter was now focused on “building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking,” Dorsey announced.23 Dorsey promised that the company would “commit to a rigorous and independently vetted set of metrics to measure the health of public conversation on Twitter.”24 Twitter was shifting from ejecting rule breakers to monitoring the “healthiness” of tweeted conversations, and sure enough in May 2018, Twitter announced that it was taking steps to fight “bad-faith actors” on the platform, in order to promote “healthy conversation.” As senior Twitter strategist Nick Pickles told Congress two months later, the changes would allow Twitter to “more effectively address behaviors and activity on the platform that do not necessarily violate our policies, but that distort and detract from the public conversation.”25 Pickles told Congress that “this approach enables us to improve the overall health of the conversation without needing to remove content from Twitter.” Pickles continued: “Ultimately, everyone’s comments and perspectives are available, but those who are simply looking to disrupt the conversation will not be rewarded by having their Tweets placed at the top of the conversation or search results.”
Much about the new operation remained hidden. Twitter refused to disclose how the operation worked, who would be considered a bad-faith actor, or how it would make that determination. Twitter said the change wasn’t political in intent, but it soon became political in effect.
Twitter Shadow-Bans Conservative Users
In July 2018, Vice News, a left-liberal publication, reveal
ed that Twitter was making the accounts of several high-profile Republicans harder to find. The suppressed accounts included four Republican members of Congress and Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.26 Vice News reported that “Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus” was similarly hidden in Twitter searches.
Twitter didn’t penalize the Republican congressmen because they said something offensive, but because the “wrong” accounts were engaging with their tweets, Twitter executives conceded. Apparently, the censored Republicans were guilty of being followed by people deemed “bad faith actors” opposed to “healthy conversation.” Forget guilt by association, this was guilt by notoriety.
The Manipulators Page 8