Move along, nothing to see
That Twitter censored conservatives and conservative ideas (or, really, anyone who disagreed with leftist orthodoxy on the pressing issues of the day) it seems has now been fully confirmed by documents from Twitter itself, released by new owner Elon Musk to independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
According to Weiss, the release “reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
This is a scandal that has few parallels in the annals of American media. Given the regrettable degree to which so many Americans now get their information about politics and public policy from sources like Twitter, it is also ominous in its implications. Such a combination of dependence and censorship is a vastly greater threat to democracy than anything associated with Donald Trump, because a public that routinely consumes news without knowing it is censored and ideologically manipulated becomes an ignorant public incapable of governing itself.
Under such circumstances, people will come to believe a great deal that is neither true nor important while being oblivious of much that is both.
Perhaps an even bigger scandal than Twitter censorship, however, is that thus far many of our nation’s most influential media outlets have decided, in a revealing extension of the Twitter tendency, to spike the story. That reporters and pundits now ignoring the revelations previously dismissed such censorship claims as “conspiracy theory” only makes it more embarrassing. (So what do you call a “conspiracy theory” that turns out to be true, other than the truth? And what do you call journalists who aren’t interested in the truth? Hint: something other than journalists.)
Joe Concha, writing in The Hill, noted that “On the day of and one day after the Twitter dump … The [New York] Times, The [Washington] Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and MSNBC all avoided the story in their print and digital publications and on their airwaves. … Call it the ‘bias of omission,’ which is arguably worse than overt bias because the public is never told of information that may concern them or be of interest to them.”
Indeed, what little coverage of the story we have seen in major news outlets has consisted mostly of attacks upon Musk for releasing the files and for how his efforts to reduce censorship at Twitter have encouraged “hate speech.”
The offense thereby comes in no less than four layers: (1) that Twitter was censoring contrary opinions and information (while publicly denying it was doing so); (2) that so-called journalists dismissed those claims without exploring them, and now pointedly ignore the evidence that they were true; (3) that so many of those who run our nation’s most influential media outlets apparently find nothing wrong with (perhaps even applaud) such censorship; and (4) that the party opposing censorship (Musk) is depicted as the villain of the story rather than the party engaging in it (pre-Musk Twitter).
The episode confirms that censorship can involve more than just suppressing speech (as occurred at Twitter and perhaps other social media platforms); the same effect can be achieved in more passive fashion by simply looking the other way when encountering stories that might make the left look bad (by confirming claims made by the right).
What constitutes “news” for many of our major media outlets is increasingly determined by whether it helps or hurts the progressive agenda. Musk consequently becomes a “far right activist,” in the words of one Atlantic writer, because he blew the whistle on the left (nicely conflating any criticism of the left as “far right” and with such a smear sending a signal to other progressives to ignore whatever he says or does).
Based on the Twitter files and other abundant evidence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that many who now graduate from our journalism schools and subsequently claim to be journalists are actually little more than political activists tailoring their work to fit their ideological goals; they find little troubling in the idea of journalists getting into the censorship business so long it is people they dislike who are getting censored.
The contrast between then (my own journalism school days) and now could hardly be more vivid. Just about everybody I went to school with and who we were taught by considered themselves liberals, but it would have been unthinkable (and inviting of a failing grade) to have inserted such biases into what we wrote for our news-writing courses.
To the contrary, I recall taking the obligatory course in “journalistic ethics” with a young radical left professor whose hero was Supreme Court justice and outspoken civil libertarian William O. Douglas. The course consisted largely of a vigorous defense of the First Amendment and of how the primary duty of journalism was to seek and report the truth, whatever the consequences. Underlying it all, at that time unremarkably, was the notion that freedom of speech and press were the most important of all liberal values.
I took that course more than 40 years ago, and I have no idea where that professor is today, but I have a strong hunch that he is ashamed of what so much of our media has become.