After public protests, Twitter restored the congressmen’s visibility on the platform, but the underlying issue remains unchanged. Twitter still buries accounts from so-called “bad-faith actors” while remaining opaque about who fits that classification or exactly how its algorithms work.
Twitter’s Charm Offensive
After its censorship of Republican congressmen was revealed, Twitter launched a well-publicized “charm offensive” to regain conservatives’ trust. Dorsey granted interviews to a handful of conservatives, and the company announced plans to hold a series of meetings with leaders on the right. In one such interview on Fox News Radio, Dorsey used a sleight-of-hand to explain away the controversy. He pointed out that Twitter had shifted to a ranked timeline algorithm two years previously, while not mentioning that the algorithm had been changed to punish “bad-faith actors.”27
Still, Twitter’s charm offensive was successful because it quickly convinced liberal journalists that Twitter was taking conservatives’ concerns seriously. “We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning,” Dorsey said on CNN. “And I think it’s important to articulate our own bias and to share it with people so that people understand us. But we need to remove our bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement.” Dorsey sounded a similar note in an interview with Recode a few days later, noting that conservatives in the company self-censor to avoid backlash from their liberal colleagues. “I mean, we have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey told Recode. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right. We should make sure that everyone feels safe to express themselves within the company, no matter where they come from and what their background is.”
It’s nice that Twitter’s CEO was open about his company’s left-wing bias when speaking to liberal journalists. But it directly contradicted what his company spokesmen told conservatives in private meetings.
Cuccinelli Delivers a Warning
In one such meeting, two Twitter representatives, both former Republican staffers, assured a room full of conservative politicos that Twitter was a relatively neutral company and that conservatives at Twitter felt perfectly comfortable expressing their opinions, according to audio I obtained of the meeting, and sources inside the room. Conservatives in the room were skeptical, and some even walked out before the meeting ended. Ken Cuccinelli, then the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, delivered a fiery rant at Twitter’s representatives over the speakerphone. (Full disclosure: I interned for a summer on Cuccinelli’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign.) “Twitter is institutionally radically left-wing, and that is never going to change. There are two levels of implementation [of] neutral policy: one is writing neutral policies and one is implementing neutral policies. You can write neutral policies [but] when you have radical left wingers implementing them, then you will get radical left-wing outcomes,” said Cuccinelli, who went on to join the Trump administration in 2019. “The solution for us is—and I’ll let the Twitter people know—the minute there is a conservative alternative, I’m dropping you guys like a hot rock and I’d like you to take that back to your company. [Senate Conservatives Fund] will encourage all of our members to drop you guys like a hot rock and I’m sure a lot of the other groups in the room will do the same thing,” he continued, receiving murmurs of approval from those in attendance. Cuccinelli concluded: “The notion that there isn’t a double standard is indefensible.”
Twitter’s Left-Wing Academics
In fact, instead of guarding against leftist bias at the company, Twitter increased it. On July 30, 2018, Twitter announced that it was launching a task force of academics to fight partisan echo chambers and intolerance. “In the context of growing political polarization, the spread of misinformation, and increases in incivility and intolerance, it is clear that if we are going to effectively evaluate and address some of the most difficult challenges arising on social media, academic researchers and tech companies will need to work together much more closely,” said Dr. Rebekah Tromble, the lead professor on the project.28 As part of the project, Twitter would work with the academics to develop algorithms to combat “intolerant discourse—such as hate speech, racism, and xenophobia,” which the company called “inherently threatening to democracy.”29
We know what happens when left-wing academics are given the power to police “intolerant” speech at institutions. Overt hostility to free speech and due process quickly emerges. Feelings are prioritized over truth. The institution you get resembles the University of California at Berkeley. We’re now in the process of seeing what happens when left-wing academics are empowered to draw speech boundaries on social media.
Twitter’s Internal Push for More Censorship
In August 2018, Twitter faced a backlash from its own employees for not moving quickly enough to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from the platform, especially as Jones had recently been banned from YouTube and Facebook. “There is no honor in resisting ‘outside pressure,’ just to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘impartial,’ ” Twitter engineer Marina Zhao wrote in a tweet addressed to her boss, Dorsey. She added: “Twitter does not exist in a vacuum, and it is wrong to ignore the serious real-world harm, and to equate that with political viewpoints.”30
“I don’t agree with everything Twitter does or doesn’t do. If we can consistently enforce the policies and terms of service for the platform, that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t mean we should be satisfied with the policies we have,” another Twitter engineer, Mike Cvet, wrote to Dorsey. “It is impossible to promote healthy dialog with bad-faith actors, who regularly produce toxic, dangerous and demonstrably false conspiracy theories; the objective of which is to mislead, radicalize, divide.” Cvet said. In a response to Cvet, Dorsey said he also wasn’t happy about the company’s policies, which he said “need to constantly evolve.”31
Twitter caved to the internal pressure almost instantly. Twitter vice president Del Harvey sent a company-wide email the very next day announcing plans to accelerate further speech restrictions, citing “a number of conversations with staff about Alex Jones” as the reason. “We’re shifting our timeline forward for reviewing the dehumanization policy with staff and will be doing so this week,” Harvey assured employees in the internal email. “We’re going to move up our timeline around a policy governing off-platform behavior, with a goal of having a recommendation for a path forward for staff review by mid-September or earlier (resource-dependent).” Harvey didn’t elaborate on the specific details of the “dehumanization policy” in that email, but it later proved to be (surprise!) a giant step towards restricting free speech on the platform.
* * *
“Men aren’t women.” It’s a self-evident truth on its own terms. The first entry for “man” in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is: “an individual human; especially: an adult male human.”32 Its top definition for “woman” is “an adult female person.”33 “Men aren’t women” is a truth as obvious as “two plus two equals four.” But it’s a truth that’s becoming increasingly unpopular on the far left, and one that the political and cultural establishment have shown little interest in defending.
Business Insider writer Daniella Greenbaum quit her job after the company bowed to outside pressure and deleted one of her columns. “Scarlett Johansson is the latest target of the social-justice warrior mob. The actress is being chastised for, well, acting,” Greenbaum wrote in the offending column. “She has been cast in a movie in which she will play someone different than herself. For this great crime—which seems to essentially define the career path she has chosen—she is being castigated for being insufficiently sensitive to the transgender community.”34 The outrage mobs came for Greenbaum’s article and demanded Business Insider delete it. Som
e of Greenbaum’s colleagues told management they were uncomfortable with the article. Business Insider caved shortly thereafter and pulled the article.35
Democratic politicians are making it easier to deny free speech that affirms biological facts by making the recognition of biological facts punishable by law. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, for instance, wants the government to punish athletic organizations that don’t allow biological males to compete against women. The congresswoman called it a “myth” that men who identify as transgender women have a “direct competitive advantage” and urged investigation of “this discriminatory behavior.”36 In May 2019, the House of Representatives passed, with unanimous Democrat support, the Equality Act, which would require schools to include male athletes who identify as transgender girls on female sports teams.37 Every Democratic presidential candidate polling above one percent endorsed the radical bill.38
Social media rulebooks have of course taken up the left’s insistence on denying biological realities. Twitter suspended Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy in November 2018 for saying that biological men who identify as transgender women aren’t real women. Murphy outlined her months-long battle with Twitter on her website, Feminist Current. Once she did, left-wing transgender activists targeted Murphy’s account for months, reporting her for alleged hate speech repeatedly.39
In August 2018, Twitter dinged Murphy for using male pronouns to refer to a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman. Twitter said Murphy’s tweets violated the company’s “rules against hateful conduct” and ordered her to delete them to regain access to her account. Murphy complied. Upon regaining access to her account, she called out Twitter for the act of censorship and asked for an explanation: “Hi @Twitter, I’m a journalist. Am I no longer permitted to report facts on your platform?” Twitter retaliated. “I was promptly locked out of my account again, told I had to delete the tweet in question, and suspended for 12 hours. I appealed the suspension, as it seemed clear to me that my tweets were not ‘hateful,’ but simply stated the truth, but received no response from Twitter,” Murphy wrote. The activists continued hounding Twitter to ban Murphy for her linguistic defiance. Three months passed, during which Twitter implemented a new rule that provided the pretense for giving the activists what they wanted.
Twitter announced the change on September 25, 2018, saying it would take action against “dehumanizing” speech in the future. “For the last three months, we have been developing a new policy to address dehumanizing language on Twitter. Language that makes someone less than human can have repercussions off the service, including normalizing serious violence,” Twitter announced in a blog post.40 “With this change, we want to expand our hateful conduct policy to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target,” the company explained. Twitter vice president Del Harvey explained the tech corporation’s reasoning:
We obviously get reports from people about content that they believe violates our rules that does not. The dehumanizing content and the dehumanizing behavior is one of the areas that really makes up a significant chunk of those reports. We’ve gotten feedback not just in terms of the research that’s out there about potential real-world harms, we’ve gotten feedback from the people who use Twitter about this being something they view as deeply problematic. All of those things add together to say we should absolutely be trying to make sure we aren’t limiting how we think about our policies to just those that are dealing with whether an individual was specifically referenced.41
Harvey’s remarks attracted little attention at the time, but they indicated a giant step forward for the pro-censorship crowd: Twitter already banned “hate speech,” but that wasn’t enough to justify banning the types of tweets and tweeters that leftists wanted banned. Left-wing ideologues wanted people who rejected their narrative to be banned, even though they were fully complying with Twitter’s rules. So, Twitter changed the rules.
Twitter didn’t reveal just how dramatic the change would be until the following month. In October 2018, Twitter quietly posted this update to its rules: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” That is: it was now against Twitter’s rules to describe a biological male, who identifies as a transgender woman, as a biological male. It’s also against the rules to refer to an individual by their legal name if they’ve adopted a different name as part of their transgender identity.
Twitter locked Murphy out of her account once again on November 15, citing two tweets she wrote in October. “Men aren’t women,” Murphy wrote in one tweet. In another, referring to biological males who identify as transgender women, she wrote: “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” Twitter once more forced Murphy to delete the tweets to regain access to her account. In an ensuing series of tweets, the feminist writer criticized Twitter’s censorship as Orwellian and noted the massive implications at stake: “I’m not allowed to say that men aren’t women or ask questions about the notion of transgenderism at all anymore? That a multi-billion dollar company is censoring basic facts and silencing people who ask questions about this dogma is insane.” Twitter forced her to delete those tweets as well.
Murphy responded by posting a statement on her website, saying “while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as ‘men aren’t women.’ ” Murphy called that glaring contradiction “insane.” She added:
This is hardly an abhorrent thing to say, nor should it be considered “hateful” to ask questions about the notion that people can change sex, or ask for explanations about transgender ideology. These are now, like it or not, public debates—debates that are impacting people’s lives, as legislation and policy are being imposed based on gender identity ideology (that is, the belief that a male person can “identify” as female or vice versa). That trans activists and their allies may find my questions about what “transgender” means or how a person can literally change sex uncomfortable, as they seem not to be able to respond to them, which I can imagine feels uncomfortably embarrassing, feeling uncomfortable is not a good enough reason to censor and silence people.
Murphy is hardly a conservative, but she recognized that the push for online censorship isn’t coming from the right.
There are numerous feminists around the world and unaffiliated members of the general public who see transgender ideology as dangerous (or simply ridiculous), and are critical of the ongoing silencing and smearing of those who challenge it. But one thing that does seem undeniable to me—something that the left should consider carefully, in terms of their own political strategizing—is that while the left seems to have taken to ignoring or refusing to engage with detractors or those who have opinions they disagree with or don’t like, the right continues to be interested in and open to engaging. And I think this is a good thing.
Shortly after Murphy posted the statement, Twitter permanently banned her from the platform. The ban signified a seismic shift. When one of the world’s most influential platforms makes speaking self-evident truths—like the fact that men aren’t women and women aren’t men—dependent upon permission, we’re well on our way to the dystopian vision George Orwell described in his novel 1984. Two plus two only equals four until it gets in the way of progressive victories, at which point two plus two may equal three, and you’re ignorant and hateful for asserting otherwise.
Twitter suspended Greg Scott, the media director for the Heritage Foundation, in May 2019 for pointing out the unfairness of a biological male competing as a transgender female weightlifter: “If any competitive sport hi
ghlights the differences [between] men & women that EVERYONE KNOWS ARE REAL, it is powerlifting.”42 Twitter suspended Scott for violating its “hateful conduct” policies.
“What they force you to do in order to be able to be back on the platform is they essentially, like a fundamentalist religious cult, force you to confess, repent and promise to Jack [Dorsey] that you will be a good Twittizen in the future,” Scott told the Daily Caller.43
Twitter suspended Ray Blanchard, a well-respected expert on gender dysphoria issues, after he tweeted six positions on transgenderism based on his research in the field:
Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder, which may leave the individual with average or even above-average functioning in unrelated areas of life.
Sex change surgery is still the best treatment for carefully screened, adult patients, whose gender dysphoria has proven resistant to other forms of treatment.
Sex change surgery should not be considered for any patient until that patient has reached the age of 21 years and has lived for at least two years in the desired gender role.
Gender dysphoria is not a sexual orientation, but it is virtually always preceded or accompanied by an atypical sexual orientation—in males, either homosexuality (sexual arousal by members of one’s own biological sex)… or autogynephilia (sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a female).
There are two main types of gender dysphoria in males, one associated with homosexuality and one associated with autogynephilia. Traditionally, the great bulk of female-to-male transsexuals has been homosexual in erotic object choice.
The sex of a postoperative transsexual should be analogous to a legal fiction. This legal fiction would apply to some things (e.g., sex designation on a driver’s license) but not to others (entering a sports competition as one’s adopted sex).
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