Big Tech censorship is a very real facet of everyday political life. If you’re on the Right, and you have something controversial to say, you will most definitely be subject to some form of censorship. For Republicans who were questioning the results of the 2020, censorship has been used liberally against them.
A new study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology surveyed 9,000 politically active Twitter users who posted election hashtags in October 2020. The users observed were half Republican and half Democrat.
In the six months in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, Republicans were 4.6 more likely to get booted from Twitter than Democrats.
During this six-month period, an alarming 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended from Twitter. On the other hand, there were only 7.7% of the Democrat users who were suspended.
The study made the argument that Republicans being censored more than Democrats “provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices.”
The study asserted that this disparity in Twitter suspension rates “could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation” and argued that “a users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as their political orientation.”
That said, Tom Parker of Reclaim the Net claimed that “the way study defines misinformation doesn’t focus on the accuracy of the content being shared.”
Parker added:
Instead, it uses the “trust” ratings of 60 websites from a previous study. This study gave mainstream media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, high trust ratings and independent media outlets, such as Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Daily Wire, low trust ratings.
In other words, a user who shares large numbers of links to mainstream media stories that have a high trust rating is assumed to be sharing accurate information. Such assumption is held even if the stories these users share have feature inaccurate information or are demonstrably false.
In a similar vein, if a user posts links to accurate stories from independent media outlets with low trust ratings, the study assumes that they’re spreading stories featuring “misinformation.”
Republican users are clearly being discriminated against by the Big Tech Masters of Universe. Liberty conservatives will need to exercise realpolitik and recognize that Big Tech falls in the enemy column of the friend-enemy distinction.
Big Tech regulation — Internet Bill of Rights, treating Big Tech companies like public utilities, and break-ups of Big Tech giants — should be on the table for reforming Big Tech.
