Discover the Networks

Twitter is the world’s most popular microblogging website. According to Oberlo.com, it has 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users. Approximately 500 million tweets are posted each day; some 500 million people access Twitter every month without logging into an account; more than one-fifth of all U.S.-based Internet users access Twitter at least once monthly; and 63% of Twitter users around the world are men between the ages of 35 and 65.

The idea behind Twitter when it was founded was that anyone could open an account and express themselves to the world, free of charge. A user accesses the Twitter website by computer or smartphone and types a brief message limited to 280 characters (including spaces). The message then goes out over the Twitter network where subscribers, who are called “followers,” and others may read the post. The original character limit was 140, but Twitter doubled it in 2017. Users may post their thoughts along with photos, memes, videos, and other media.

In its formative years, Twitter was devoted to free speech. But that changed as the website grew, particularly after Donald Trump — an unorthodox Republican politician who inspired intense, visceral hatred from the Left — was elected U.S. President in November 2016. A prolific Twitter user, Trump used the social media platform so much during the 2016 campaign and after, that some dubbed him the “first Twitter president,” according to The Verge.

The ascendancy of Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey was tied to the rise of Trump. As of January 2020, Dorsey’s personal net worth had more than tripled since Trump became president three years before. Over that three-year period, said a January 2020 Forbes magazine report, “the tweeter-in-chief [i.e., Trump] acted as a one-man headline machine for the social media network, creating news by berating his critics, praising his acolytes and firing members of his cabinet—all on Twitter.”

Twitter’s Beginnings & Its Growth

The driving force behind Twitter has always been Jack Dorsey. In 2006, Dorsey wrote taxi-dispatching software that taxicab companies opted to use. He attended and then dropped out of New York University before relocating in 1999 to San Francisco, where he established a business that used the Internet to process the dispatching of taxis, couriers, and emergency vehicles.

In 2006 Dorsey approached entrepreneurs Evan Williams and Christopher “Biz” Stone with an idea about using instant messaging and texting; that idea would soon morph into Twitter. Dorsey himself wrote and published the first-ever tweet that same year. The name Twitter was reportedly inspired by bird sounds and was adopted after other names, including FriendStalker, were considered but turned down. Twitter made its public debut in March 2007 at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. The next month, Twitter Inc. took in venture capital and was formally incorporated.

Before long, Twitter began to revolutionize mass communication, becoming a popular means of social networking and a mainstream form of communication used by elected officials, celebrities, corporate and philanthropic leaders, athletes, and public figures of all varieties. Dorsey served as Twitter’s CEO until October 2008, at which time he assumed the post of chairman of the board.

Twitter’s popularity got a boost in 2009 when actor and TV presenter Ashton Kutcher raced with CNN to see which could reach 1 million followers first. (CNN lost.) Twitter was then featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which led to record-setting rates of new user sign-ups.

Notwithstanding Twitter’s impressive growth, it remained unclear how the company was going to make money. Twitter did not enjoy the kind of revenue stream that typically helped websites based on membership fees or banner advertising stay financially afloat. Even as the number of unique visitors soared by 1,300 percent in 2009, the enterprise had yet to turn a profit. Twitter solved the problem in April 2010 by offering “promoted tweets,” or ads that would be embedded in search results, and this would become the website’s principal source of revenue.

In 2011, Twitter reached the 100-million user milestone. That same year, President Barack Obama invited Jack Dorsey to moderate a Twitter town hall meeting at the White House.

By 2013, commentators had come to realize Twitter’s enormous ability to influence political debate. For instance, Twitter had a noticeable “impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues,” wrote John Naughton at the (UK) Guardian. “What is astonishing about Twitter,” he elaborated, “is that in the seven years since it was founded as a side project to share messages among a group of friends, it has become the de facto newswire for the planet. And, unlike the recognized newswires (Reuters, AP, etc), it is available to everyone, which is why even governments sometimes now use it to release news before they give it to mainstream media.” “Twitter also has the capacity to turn ‘ordinary’ people into broadcasters,” added Naughton, “a development whose implications we are only just beginning to digest.”

In 2013, Dorsey helped Twitter raise $1.8 billion in capital during the company’s initial public offering.

In October 2015, while still serving as the CEO of Square — a software company he had co-founded in 2009 — Dorsey again assumed the role of CEO at Twitter. The company continued to grow at a rapid rate under his leadership. By the end of 2019, it employed some 4,800 workers. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the initialism TWTR, the stock closed at $43.62 per share on November 19, 2020, leaving the company with a market capitalization of $34.69 billion.

The Hashtag

The brainchild of Silicon Valley product designer Chris Messina, the hashtag, or # symbol, made its debut on Twitter in 2007 as a way to label tweets that dealt with specific subjects. “There was a small group of us in San Francisco using an early social network called Twitter,” Messina recalls. “We were thinking Twitter needs some kind of group organizing framework.”

Messina says he got the idea of using the pound symbol to tag tweets after seeing it prefixed to the names of Internet chat rooms. He suggested the idea to Twitter but was told that it was too “nerdy” to catch on with users.

Later in 2007, Messina asked a friend who was tweeting about a wildfire in San Diego, to add “#sandiegofire” to his tweet. Other users used the hashtag as well, and the device quickly became a regular feature of tweets. “The fact that other people actually emulated him in real time during those fires gave me a sense that this could actually work,” says Messina. “It turned out that lots of people wanted to have their voices heard and participate in a global conversation.”

By 2009, Twitter had modified its template to allow users to search for hashtags. That same year, Twitter sold the rights for its tweets to become viewable on the search engines of Bing and Google for $10 million and $15 million, respectively.

Instagram users began adding hashtags to their posts in 2010, and Facebook adopted them in 2013.

According to an April 2018 report by CNBC: “While some users simply want to brag on social media, others are using the versatile [hashtag] tool for change. It’s what some media outlets are calling ‘hashtag activism.’ #NeverAgain, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter movements have gained incredible momentum thanks to their hashtags. The hashtag even had incredible influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election with tags like #imwithher, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, #lockherup and #feelthebern.”

Twitter Helps Circumvent Government Repression of Free Speech in Iran

In 2009, Twitter delayed its scheduled server maintenance when demonstrators in the Islamic Republic of Iran, angry about a corrupt presidential election in their country, used the website to coordinate anti-government protests. As government-controlled Iranian media reported that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election, supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi flooded the streets but were quickly suppressed by the government. Twitter, at that point, emerged as a vehicle for disseminating information that could circumvent government censors. According to one account in Britannica.com:

Addressing Complaints about Online Misconduct

As Twitter, which initially had very few rules defining acceptable versus unacceptable online conduct, grew, complaints about users’ misconduct increased in number. Thus, at the end of 2014 the company announced that it would thenceforth be putting greater effort into combating online abuse. In March 2015, Twitter unveiled a “Quality Filter” feature for iOS (Apple product) users to block bullying tweets from their feed.

In 2015 as well, left-wing activist DeRay Mckesson had conservative investigative journalist Chuck C. Johnson permanently banned by Twitter. Johnson had asked supporters to donate money to help him in the “taking out” of Mckesson, which the latter interpreted, without evidence, as a threat of violence. Mckesson then appeared on CNN asking for Johnson to be booted from Twitter. “I have faith in the platform,” he told the network. “I hope his suspension is indefinite.”

Blue Check Marks & the Banning of Milo Yiannopoulos

In January 2016 the controversial conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos, who at that time was the tech editor at Breitbart News, lost the blue check mark on his Twitter profile. The check mark is a badge indicating that Twitter has confirmed the identity of the user, and is intended to reassure high-profile Twitter users that impersonators and parody-account creators will not be able to tweet in their names and embarrass them.

It is unclear why Yiannopoulos’ blue check mark was deleted by Twitter, but he raised the issue at a March 2016 White House press conference where he said:

President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, replied to Yiannopoulos, saying that while private companies were free to enforce their own rules, private citizens who felt that their rights had been violated could “address that before a judge in a court of law.”

Twitter, which typically did not bother to explain why it banned users, banned Yiannopoulos in July 2016 after he posted series of tweets critical of Leslie Jones, a black comedic actress who had recently appeared in a female-led version of the movie Ghostbusters. Yiannopoulos’ detractors characterized his tweets as a campaign of harassment aimed at Jones. Yiannopoulos in turn stated that he simply did not like the movie, and that this did not constitute harassment. Adding that any online trolls who may have gone after Jones were not his responsibility, Yiannopoulos railed at Twitter:

Yiannopoulos also said that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was “using the [Twitter] network as his own private fiefdom” to advance his preferred political agenda. “This utility, which is how Dorsey has always described it and how he’s wanted Twitter to be perceived, has always been run along party lines,” Yiannopoulos told CNBC. Moreover, he pointed out that Twitter’s opaque policies about permissible content were far too arbitrary. “I want Twitter to be honest with its users about the reasons for suspensions, bannings and all the punitive actions they take on their platform,” said Yiannopoulos.

Dorsey replied to Yiannopoulos by saying: “Abuse is not part of civil discourse. It shuts down conversation and prevents us from understanding each other. Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment if they speak up.”

In 2017, Twitter put its blue check mark verification program on hold after it fielded complaints that: (a) accused the program of being arbitrary and confusing, and (b) objected to the fact that Twitter had given a blue check to Jason Kessler, a white nationalist who was the lead organizer of the infamous August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In November 2020, Twitter acknowledged that over the years it had not “been clear about who can become verified and when, why an account might be unverified, or what it means to be verified.” To address the matter, Twitter vowed to make the guidelines public and to step up its policing of blue check holders’ conduct. According to a November 2020 report by NPR, the company said that “it expects to automatically take away more of the blue check marks from users who are inactive or [who] repeatedly break Twitter’s rules, an enforcement action aimed at minimizing a user’s visibility.”

Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council

In 2016, Twitter created a Trust and Safety Council (TSC) that Tech Crunch described as the website’s “latest step in the tricky balancing act of championing free speech without also handing a free pass to orchestrated harassment via its platform.”

Twitter said that the council would: (a) offer “input on our safety products, policies, and programs”; (b) work “with safety advocates, academics, and researchers”; (c) cooperate with “grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements”; and (d) work with “community groups working to prevent abuse.” This “multi-layered approach” was needed “to ensure people can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter,” said Patricia Cartes, Twitter’s Head of Global Policy Outreach.

Reason magazine panned the TSC project when it was announced, opining that “a quick glance at its membership roster suggests the council is almost as Orwellian as it sounds—and overwhelmingly biased in favor of speech suppression.” On the council were nearly 50 organizations helping Twitter to “strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power.” A Twitter press release listed the groups:

In August 2019, Wired.com reported that members of the TSC had complained, in a letter to Twitter, that the company was ignoring them. “For the first two years of its existence, the council’s relationship with Twitter was relatively fruitful,” said the Wired.com piece. “Representatives met CEO Jack Dorsey at annual summits, and held regular calls with other company executives to discuss new policies well in advance of their rollouts. But this year, some council members say, Twitter has been far less communicative, leaving them to wonder whether its leaders still value their input and expertise.”

The TSC members’ letter also stated that council members had been left in the dark: “There have been no advance heads-up of Twitter’s policy or product changes to the council, leaving many of us to have no prior warning or let alone knowledge when answering press and media inquiries … This is embarrassing.”

In December 2019, Twitter announced that it was expanding the TSC and modifying its focus. Groups would be added to the council to advise on the “key areas” of: “Safety and online harassment”; “Human and digital rights”; “Child sexual exploitation”; and “Suicide prevention and mental health.” Twitter also planned to create “working groups on additional areas of concern,” including one that “will work on the issues we face as we broaden our interpretation of dehumanization.”

Opposing Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign

In July 2016, three past and present Twitter executives were among the signatories to a document titled “An open letter from technology sector leaders on Donald Trump’s candidacy for President,” which was written by Katie Stanton, Twitter’s former Vice President of Global Media. Some excerpts from this letter:

2017

In 2017, Twitter banned the accounts of such notable individuals and entities as: (a) the British politician Jayda Fransen and members of her political party, Britain First; (b) alleged American white nationalist Jared Taylor and his publication American Renaissance; (c) Donald Trump ally Roger Stone; (d) Trump supporter Baked Alaska (Tim Gionet); (e) American pharmaceuticals magnate Martin Shkreli; and (f) briefly, actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan, who reportedly tweeted a private telephone number, an act that violated Twitter’s terms of service.

Twitter also deactivated the accounts of 2,752 Russian trolls (a list may be found here) after an investigation into the Russian Internet Research Agency.

In addition, Twitter censored one of its most popular users, President Donald Trump, in November 2017. The operation was carried out by Twitter employee Bahtiyar Duysak, “a twenty-something with Turkish roots who was born and raised in Germany,” according to Tech Crunch. For 11 minutes the president’s page informed users, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” Twitter initially claimed that the account had been “deactivated due to human error.” Dorsey subsequently announced that the turning off of Trump’s account was a mistake. “We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again,” tweeted the Twitter Government page. “We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it.”

The Left was overjoyed, however, that Trump had been silenced, if only briefly. “Just gonna say it, the employee at Twitter who shut off Trump’s account for 11 mins could become a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize[,]” tweeted former U.S. Rep. David Jolly (D-Florida) on November 2, 2017.

2018

In January, former Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., an outspoken Trump supporter, was temporarily blocked on Twitter for criticizing the mainstream media. One of the tweets in question, which Clarke later took down, said: “When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is to go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown.”^[1]

For alleged rule violations, British activist and English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson was also banned in 2018, as were The Proud Boys and their founder Gavin McInnes, along with Alex Jones and his Infowars website.

Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy was banned by Twitter in February 2018 after she tweeted that “men aren’t women” and “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?”

In August 2018, Twitter suspended the account of conservative activist Candace Owens, the communications director of Turning Point USA, after she mimicked the racist tweets of New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong as a way of mocking them. As CNS News reported:

In September 2018, journalist and conservative activist Laura Loomer took a page from the book of left-wing political theatrics when she was escorted out of a congressional hearing at which she confronted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was appearing as a witness. “You are censoring conservatives,” Loomer said. “I am asking you, President Donald Trump, help us. Please help us, Mr. President, before it is too late, because Jack Dorsey is trying to influence the [midertm] election, to sway the election to the Democrats and steal the election. That is why he’s censoring and shadow banning conservatives. You are a liar, Jack Dorsey. You are a liar.” As she was whisked out of the room, Loomer said, “We are not Russian bots, we are conservatives.”

Loomer live-streamed the events on her smartphone, asking reporters outside the hearing room: “You want conservatives and Trump supporters to be shut down, but what’s gonna happen when they come for you?” “We have an obligation as journalists to protect each other,” she continued, “and when you allow people like Jack Dorsey to come in and lie to our elected officials and say he doesn’t censor conservatives, we have a journalistic responsibility to hold him accountable. We have a duty to hold him accountable.”

In November 2018, Loomer herself was banned by Twitter after criticizing Ilhan Omar, who had just been elected as a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota. Loomer’s offending tweet read as follows: “Isn’t it ironic how the twitter moment [that is] used to celebrate ‘women, LGBTQ, and minorities’ is a picture of Ilhan Omar? Ilhan is pro Sharia. Ilhan is pro-FGM [female genital mutilation] Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab. Ilhan is anti Jewish.”

Days later, Loomer — wearing a sweatshirt that bore a yellow Star of David (such as European Jews had been forced to wear during the Holocaust) and the slogan “#STOPTHEBIAS” — took the fight to Twitter and chained herself to the front door of the company’s Manhattan headquarters for two hours, to protest her banishment. She livestreamed her protest on Periscope, the live-video subsidiary of InfoWars, and shouted at Twitter employees that they were working for an “evil” company.

Conservative talk radio host and former GOP candidate Jesse Kelly, associated with The Federalist, was banned from Twitter for no apparent reason in November 2018. Two days later, Kelly’s account just as mysteriously reappeared on Twitter with no explanation from the company.

Dorsey Testifies before Congress

In a September 5, 2018 hearing about “Twitter’s controversial history of arbitrarily censoring content published by the site,” Jack Dorsey testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over telecommunications companies like Twitter. In the course of his testimony, Dorsey made the following statements:

On September 5, 2018 as well, Dorsey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in prepared testimony: “We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially. In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.”

But as The Federalist points out, Dorsey’s claims of political neutrality were untrue:

On the same day that Dorsey testified before Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would meet with state attorneys general later in the month to discuss concerns that tech companies “may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.”

Shadow-Banning

Twitter claims, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it does not engage in the practice of shadow-banning. In a 2018 post, the company said:

But evidence of Twitter’s shadow-banning surfaced in 2020 after the company was hacked. As The Critic reported:

Among the notable conservatives whom Twitter shadow-banned in 2018 were Congressmen Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Mark Meadows, Republican Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and the black conservative commentators known as “Diamond and Silk.”

In January 2020, Twitter made shadow-banning part of its official terms of service, stating that the company “may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service.”

2019

In August 2019, Twitter temporarily locked the “Team Mitch” campaign account of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), claiming that it had run afoul of the company’s “violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.” The problem with this decision was that the video was intended to draw attention to the bad behavior of the senator’s opponents, and showed “protesters outside McConnell’s home on Monday, where they’d gathered to call for the Kentucky Republican to take action on gun control after two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, last weekend left 31 people dead.” Black Lives Matter Louisville leader Chanelle Helm could reportedly be heard in the video saying that McConnell, who had injured himself a few days before, “should have broken his little raggedy, wrinkled-ass neck.”

In November 2019, Danielle Stella, who sought the GOP nomination against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), was banned by Twitter for posting that Omar should be executed for treason if it could be proved that she had passed sensitive information to Iran. “My suspension for advocating for the enforcement of federal code proves Twitter will always side with and fight to protect terrorists, traitors, pedophiles and rapists,” Stella said.

In December 2019, Fox News Channel journalist Pete Hegseth was temporarily suspended from Twitter for doing his job, or more specifically, “for posting an anti-American manifesto from Pensacola shooter Mohammed Alshamrani,” Deadline reported. In his description of the shooter’s activities, which had led to the deaths of 3 people and the injury of 12 others, Hegseth tweeted: “The coward posted [the manifesto] just hours before his terrorist attack. This is Islamist terror. No reason to ever mince words. Saudi Arabia must be held to account.”

The End of Political Ads on Twitter (2019)

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey abruptly announced October 30, 2019, that Twitter would stop allowing political ads to be posted on its site. In a series of tweets, he explained why the company was taking such drastic action:

2020

In April 2020, Twitter banned InfoWars personality Owen Shroyer for using Twitter and its live-video subsidiary Periscope to publicize a “You Can’t Close America” rally in Austin, Texas, opposing the state’s stay-at-home order aimed at combating COVID-19.

British entertainment industry figure Graham Linehan was banned by Twitter in June 2020 after tweeting “men aren’t women tho [sic]” in reply to a Women’s Institute post.

In June 2020 as well, high-profile, pro-Trump, British commentator Katie Hopkins was banned by Twitter for, in the company’s words, “violations of our Hateful Conduct policy.” Although Hopkins frequently made controversial statements, it is unclear what prompted the ban.

Donald Trump Jr. was temporarily suspended by Twitter in July 2020 for sharing a video clip discussing the benefits of the medication hydroxychloroquine, which some medical doctors touted as a cure or prophylactic against COVID-19. Twitter claimed that the tweet violated its rules against COVID-19 misinformation. “Twitter suspending Don Jr for sharing a viral video of medical professionals discussing their views on hydroxychloroquine is further proof that big tech is intent on killing free expression online, and is another instance of them committing election interference to stifle Republican voices,” a Trump spokesman said. “While there is indeed much disagreement in the medical community about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating coronavirus, there have been studies reported by mainstream outlets like CNN, suggesting that it may in fact by an effective treatment. Those pretending otherwise are lying for political reasons.”

Twitter Blocks Trump Tweets, but Not Those of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei

Suppressing the Hunter Biden Story

On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election — the New York Post published a potentially game-changing story showing that the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, son of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, contained hard evidence of enormous corruption and deception by the entire Biden family. The Post described it as “smoking gun” evidence in the form of emails said to show that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had secured favors from his father when the latter was the sitting U.S. vice president, to benefit Ukrainian energy concern Burisma. Burisma had paid the younger Biden $50,000 per month to sit on its board of directors.

“The Post’s hyping of the story as some cataclysmic bombshell was overblown,” wrote Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, but “these emails, if authenticated, provide some new details and corroboration, the broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the U.S. Government to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs.”

On October 15, 2020 — one day after the Post story had broken during a time period when tens of millions of Americans were participating in early voting for the presidential election — Politico reporter Jake Sherman tweeted the following: “I tweeted a link to the New York [P]ost story right after it dropped yesterday morning, I immediately reached out to the Biden campaign to see if they had any answer…. Twitter suspended me.” Twitter justified the suspension by explaining that Sherman’s account had been “locked for violating Twitter rules” against spreading alleged misinformation. Sherman explained, however, that his goal was neither to spread information or misinformation, but simply “to raise questions about the story.”

Glenn Greenwald further explained what happened immediately after the New York Post article had been published: “Pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that any journalist even mentioning it would be roundly attacked,” said Greenwald. Noting the hostile climate, Twitter and Facebook tried to kill the story. as Greenwald explained:

A follow-up New York Post article was also suppressed, Greenwald noted. This later article detailed efforts by Hunter Biden to score profitable deals with a Chinese energy outfit by dropping his father’s name. “In sum,” wrote Greenwald, “the two Silicon Valley giants, with little explanation, united to prevent the sharing and dissemination of this article. As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce put it, ‘Facebook limiting distribution is a bit like if a company that owned newspaper delivery trucks decided not to drive because it didn’t like a story. Does a truck company edit the newspaper? It does now, apparently.’”

Squelching the Hunter Biden story helped to elect his father. The month after the 2020 election, most voters believed that the media had buried the story about Hunter Biden’s foreign business adventures to aid his father’s campaign, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey. The poll found 52 percent of likely voters believed the paucity of Hunter Biden coverage was meant to help the campaign, while just 32 percent considered it a partisan hit job and 17 percent were unsure, the New York Post reported. “An even higher margin — 56 percent — said it’s ‘likely’ the elder Biden was consulted about his son’s business with Ukrainian energy company Burisma and ties to China, and perhaps profited,” said the Post. “Forty-three percent say it’s ‘very likely,’ 38 percent said it’s ‘unlikely,’ and 22 percent believe it’s ‘not at all likely’ — rates that have remained consistent with a poll in October. A whopping 76 percent of those who have been ‘very closely’ following the news believe the media ignored the stories to help the president-elect, and 72 percent of that group also think the former vice president ‘likely’ knew about and profited from his son’s dealings.”

On November 24, 2020, The Epoch Times reported that many voters in 7 battleground states who had voted for Joe Biden said they would not have voted for him if had they known about major stories the national media ignored, according to a survey that had just been made public. Knowing about claims regarding Hunter Biden’s dealings with officials and firms in China, Ukraine, and Russia would have made enough respondents change their vote to affect the outcome of the presidential election, according to the survey (pdf) of 1,750 Biden voters.

The survey found that 6 percent of Biden voters who were unaware of the information would have changed their vote to Donald Trump if they had known the information. “In 6 of the 7 states surveyed, enough voters would have not voted for Joe Biden that those states would have gone to President Trump, giving Trump 311 electoral votes and re-electing him,” the survey’s executive summary stated. “More than half of Biden voters surveyed were not aware that Facebook and Twitter prevented users from posting satirical images of Biden, or that Antifa groups and pages were still active on Facebook,” the summary stated.

“The national news media stole this election, as far as I’m concerned, they deliberately stole it from President Trump,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said as he released the survey results. “It is absolutely unequivocal, it cost Donald Trump the election.”

More in 2020

In October 2020, Twitter suspended the account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan after he: (a) touted the southern border wall’s success at preventing “gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs” from entering the United States, and (b) stated that “It’s fact, walls work.” The account was temporarily locked for violating Twitter’s “hateful conduct” policy. “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” Twitter told Morgan.

On October 18, 2020, Twitter banned the account of Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, for defending President Trump’s opposition to mask mandates vis-a vis the coronavirus pandemics. As The Federalist points out: “In his tweet, [Atlas] cited scientific studies, and the tweet contained absolutely no false information.”

In November 2020, Twitter banned the podcast promotion account of former Trump White House strategy chief Steve Bannon, @WarRoomPandemic, for supposedly glorifying violence. During his podcast, Bannon had called for infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be fired if President Trump succeeded in being reelected. Then Bannon said he would like to “go back to the old times of Tudor England,” so that Fauci and Wray could be beheaded and their heads placed “on pikes.” “I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats: you either get with the program or you’re gone. Time to stop playing games,” he said.

In November 2020 as well, Twitter suspended Bobby Piton, who, according to the NOQReport, was “a pivotal witness in … [a] voter fraud hearing before the Arizona state legislature.” “His searing testimony,” said NOQ, “pointed out blatant voter fraud [which had favored Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election] through incontrovertible evidence, at one point claiming he’d stake his life on the factual nature of his testimony.”

By contrast, in the lead-up to the November 3, 2020 presidential election, and after, Twitter had routinely attached disclaimers to tweets, including those of President Donald Trump, that took the position that election fraud was real and posed a threat to elections in the United States, reflexively dismissing such opinions as misinformation.

In December 2020, Twitter banned Dr. Zev Zelenko, creator of the Zelenko HCQ protocol, asserting that he was promoting medical misinformation by claiming that hydroxychloroquine was an effective therapeutic agent in the treatment of coronavirus infection. It was unclear “if the New York-based physician’s general stance on the coronavirus pandemic, available treatment and its efficiency, or a specific set of posts was what made Twitter decide to ban him from the platform,” ReclaimTheNet reported, adding:

Collusion with the Biden Presidential Campaign and California Democrat Officials to Censor Speech About the Election

In April 2021, it was reported that the government watchdog organization Judicial Watch had obtained — as a result of a public records request stemming from a December 2020 report that California’s Office of Election Cybersecurity had successfully asked the Big Tech companies Twitter, Facebook and Google to remove or flag at least two dozen messages — more than 500 pages of documents from the California Secretary of State. Fox Business reported that these documents showed “California officials colluding with social media giants to censor speech surrounding the 2020 elections,” adding:

2021: Twitter Cancels Accounts of President Trump, His Supporters, & Other Conservatives

On January 6, 2021 — shortly after several hundred people claiming to be Trump supporters had temporarily occupied the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to protest what they viewed as an illegitimate 2020 presidential election result — Twitter announced that it was suspending President Trump’s account, which had 88 million followers, for 12 hours. Alleging that Trump had incited the protesters’ lawlessness by tweeting that the election had been stolen from him, the company cited “severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy” by the president. “As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy,” Twitter said, adding that it planned to lock the account for 12 hours if the tweets were not taken down. “If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked,” the announcement continued. “Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.”

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all removed a video of Trump asking the Capitol protesters to disperse. “You have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order,” Trump said in the video.

Also after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Twitter announced that it had purged upwards of 70,000 accounts affiliated with conspiracy theory QAnon. “Twitter said in a blog post that it removed the accounts ‘to protect the conversation on our service from attempts to incite violence, organize attacks, and share deliberately misleading information about the election outcome,’” reported the Washington Post. “The accounts have been suspended in line with our policy on Coordinated Harmful Activity,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behavior in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content.”

On January 7, 2021, The Hill newspaper reported that Twitter had banned pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood. The company refused to explain why Wood was booted from the platform, other than to say that he had broken Twitter’s rules.

On January 7 as well, Twitter placed a 12-hour suspension on the account of Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, as punishment for Bongino’s decision to post video footage of a speech that President Trump had recently made. Upon learning of the suspension, Bongino announced that he would not be returning to Twitter, where he had 2.8 million followers. “I’ll make my last post, my one final ‘F— you’ to Twitter — and you can print that, by the way — tomorrow,” he told TheWrap on January 7. “… Regardless of your feelings about what [Trump] said and how he said it, he’s the president of the United States.”

Twitter also prevented users from commenting on, or liking, a January 7, 2021 tweet by Jenna Ellis, a member of President Trump’s legal team, after she described Arizona’s newly certified electoral votes in favor of Joe Biden as “illegal.” Ellis’ tweet read as follows: “93-6 in the Senate to ratify the illegal certification in Arizona. The Republican Party is officially over today.”

Twitter also suspended the accounts of Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (retired) and his attorney, Sidney Powell. Powell told The Epoch Times in an article dated January 8, 2021, that there “was no warning at all” about her account being deleted, a development she described as “stunning.” “Twitter’s actions and those of banks who shut down accounts of people who went to DC are fascism in its purest form,” she said. “The President must act on the foreign interference in this election. It is a communist coup that has been long and well-planned.”

On January 8, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended President Trump’s account, stating in a tweet: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” In a blog post later that same day, Twitter expanded upon the reasoning behind its decision:

In the same blog post, Twitter attributed Trump’s permanent suspension to his two most recent tweets, posted on January 8, which read as follows:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was vacationing on a private island in French Polynesia when he made the decision to permanently suspend Trump’s Twitter account. On January 6 Dorsey received a phone call from Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, to whom Dorsey had delegated all moderation-related decisions, and Gadde informed Dorsey that Trump’s account had been temporarily suspended in order to prevent him from posting any further statements relating to the protests at the Capitol. According to a New York Times report: “Mr. Dorsey was not sold on a permanent ban of Mr. Trump. He emailed employees the next day, saying it was important for the company to remain consistent with its policies, including letting a user return after a suspension. Many workers, fearing that history would not look kindly upon them, were dissatisfied. Several invoked IBM’s collaboration with the Nazis … and started a petition to immediately remove Mr. Trump’s account.” But after Trump subsequently posted two additional tweets on January 8, Dorsey and other Twitter executives decided that he had “crossed a line.” Thus came the permanent suspension, which caused many Twitter employees to celebrate — in some cases weeping with joy.^[2]

On January 17, 2021, NPR reported that Twitter had temporarily suspended the account of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), saying it did so because the Trump-supporting freshman congresswoman endorsed the QAnon conspiracy theory. Greene was locked out for “multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” a Twitter spokesperson said.

LifeSiteNews reported on January 25, 2021, that Twitter had suspended two of its accounts for referring to President Joe Biden’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health & Human Services, transgender Rachel Levine, who was born male, as a man. The accounts stated that Levine, a father of two who divorced his wife in 2013 after 30 years of marriage, was “a gender-confused man.”

On January 26, 2021, NPR reported that Twitter had permanently suspended Donald Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — the producer of Absolute Proof, a documentary claiming that the 2020 presidential election victory of Joe Biden had occurred as a result of massive fraud — for “repeated violations of our Civil Integrity Policy.” No specific tweet was singled out, but NPR claimed that Lindell had been “using his Twitter account to spread disinformation about the 2020 election, including false claims of voter fraud and election rigging.”

On February 6, 2021, Mediaite reported that Twitter had banned Jim Hoft, proprietor of the conservative, pro-Trump website Gateway Pundit. “The account was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our civic integrity policy,” said Twitter. That policy states that users are not permitted to use the platform “for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”

On February 7, 2021, Fox News reported that Twitter had banned radio host Wayne Allyn Root, on grounds that he likewise had repeatedly violated the company’s “civic integrity policy.” “I am in shock,” said Root. “It appears to be a permanent ban. Although I don’t know. Twitter never warned me…. And never sent any communication saying I’ve been suspended or banned. I simply tried to tweet yesterday afternoon and could not. But unlike a previous suspension… My followers [count] suddenly said 0 [zero].”

Also in early February 2021, Twitter censored The Daily Citizen, a publication of the Christian organization Focus On The Family, for allegedly violating Twitter’s rules against posting “hateful” content. At issue was The Daily Citizen’s January 19 decision to tweet a quote from one of its articles acknowledging that President Joe Biden had appointed the aforementioned transgender woman, Rachel Levine, to serve as Assistant Secretary of Health. The tweet read: “Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.” In response to that tweet, Twitter wrote in an email: “Hi The Daily Citizen, your account, @FocusCitizen has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

In late February 2021, Twitter banned The National Pulse editor Raheem Kassam immediately after he published an article critical of the Congressional Black Caucus.

In April 2021, Twitter locked the account of sports journalist Jason Whitlock because he criticized Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors over her recent purchase of a $1.4 million home in a predominantly white section of Los Angeles.

On April 15, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe after he posted covertly recorded, undercover videos of a CNN employee admitting that in recent years the station had dedicated its efforts to removing President Trump from office. “The account you referenced (@JamesOKeefeIII) was permanently suspended for violating the Twitter Rules on platform manipulation and spam,” said a Twitter spokesperson. “As outlined in our policy on platform manipulation and spam, ‘You can’t mislead others on Twitter by operating fake accounts,’ and ‘you can’t artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts.’” The spokesperson did not substantiate the claim that O’Keefe was running a number of fake accounts. O’Keefe said in response: “I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said I, James O’Keefe, ‘operated fake accounts.’ This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay. Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.”

In August 2021, Twitter permanently suspended former New York Times journalist and author Alex Berenson for his “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.” According to an Epoch Times report: “Before his suspension, Berenson had often cited the results of a preprint Israeli study that found that previous COVID-19 infection provides better protection against the Delta variant than any of the COVID-19 vaccines. […] Those who were vaccinated, the study found, were also at a higher risk of being hospitalized compared to people who were previously infected.” Berenson had previously observed that “we are sliding into a new age of censorship and suppression, encouraged by technology giants and traditional media companies.”

On December 29, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Dr. Robert Malone, an American virologist and immunologist who is considered to be the inventor of the mRNA technology upon which the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19 were based. According to The Rio Times: “Malone is an internationally recognized vaccine researcher who has authored dozens of scientific papers and been cited thousands of times…. Although Malone supports vaccines as a medical doctor, he believes that the steps the United States government has taken to bring mRNA Covid-19 vaccines to market from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna ‘have been detrimental and contrary to globally accepted standards for developing and regulating safe and effective licensed products.’ He shares his views on social media…. [H]is Twitter account had over half a million followers when it was permanently suspended.”

Just hours before the Twitter ban, The Associated Press had posted a “fact check” report claiming that Malone had “misled” the public by claiming that the vaccines were failing to protect people against the Omicron variant of COVID-19. A Twitter spokesperson said that the permanent suspension of Malone’s account was due to his “repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy.”

Project Veritas Audio Exposes Dorsey’s Plans for Widespread Censorship by Twitter in the Future

In a secret recording of a January 8, 2021 telephone conference call that was leaked to Project Veritas, a conservative undercover journalism enterprise, Jack Dorsey stated that Twitter was exploring a long-term political censorship campaign to purge and ban users whose views the company deemed objectionable. During the phone call, Dorsey said:

Additional Project Veritas video footage from the same day showed Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead — promising to conduct censorship on a global scale. “One of the interesting things is a lot of the work that we’ve been doing over the last week is work that we’ve built on in other places around the world, where we’ve seen violence unfold as a result of either misleading information or coded rhetoric,” said Gadde. “We decided to escalate our enforcement of the civic integrity policy and use a label that disabled engagements to stop the spread of potentially inflammatory content, which is the content around election interference, election fraud, stealing the election, that type of thing,” she added. “We’re going to actually be more aggressive in our enforcement beyond de-amplification.”

Twitter subsequently retaliated against Project Veritas by banning the nonprofit investigative outfit from its platform, The Hill newspaper reported on February 11, 2021.

Twitter’s Measurable Contribution to the Diminution of Free Speech

A study by Zingal Labs, released a few days before President Trump left office on January 20, 2021, claimed that his removal from social media had caused discussion about election fraud to plummet by 73 percent, from 2.5 million mentions across social media platforms to approximately 688,000.

The Malicious Attack on Parler

After the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, Silicon Valley giants Amazon (server space provider), Apple (operator of the App Store needed to procure applications), and Google (operator of the Play Store needed to procure applications) openly colluded to shut down Twitter’s competition, the alternative microblogging website Parler, falsely claiming that the latter had allowed itself to be used as a forum in which the Capitol conspirators could plan their uprising.^[3]

At that time, Parler was the #1 most popular application in Apple’s App store, as many hundreds of thousands of people – craving a free-speech forum and objecting to the rampant censorship practiced by Twitter and Facebook – had recently opened new accounts with Parler. But as a result of the Amazon-Apple-Google-Twitter collusion, Parler went offline for several weeks as it undertook the massive task of reorganizing its technical infrastructure.

Notably, the rationale that Amazon, Apple, and Google explicitly cited as justification for derailing Parler – the notion that Parler had served as a vital organizing forum for those who rioted at the Capitol on January 6 – was wholly fictitious. As the Post Millennial reported on January 13, 2021: “The censoring and removal of Parler at the hands of … the three big tech companies, Apple, Google, and Amazon, [has given rise to] … accusations of abusing monopolistic market power. No evidence has arisen thus far showing that any of the rioters organized the raid on the Capitol over Parler.”

Journalist and former civil rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on January 12, 2021, to set the record straight about the scapegoating of Parler:

Also during his January 12 appearance on Fox News, Greenwald assailed Twitter over its behavior during the 2020 election cycle, describing its weeks-long censorship of the bombshell October 26th New York Post story about the Biden family’s corruption as “one of the most alarming events to ever take place in American politics in the last decade.” (NOTE: In the days leading up to the November 3, 2020 election, many early voters said they would not have supported Biden for president if they had heard about that story in the New York Post, whose Twitter account was immobilized in order to prevent it from publicizing the facts.)

In a January 12, 2021 article at Substack, Greenwald noted that “liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control US political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms.” “Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way,” added Greenwald, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

Left-wing journalist Michelle Goldberg, who seemed worried about the power of big tech companies, praised their heavy-handedness nevertheless. “That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism and they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents.”

On February 8, 2021, Forbes magazine provided updated statistics vis-à-vis the extent to which Parler had been used by organizers of the January 6 Capitol riot:

Twitter’s Hypocrisy & Double Standards

In mid-January 2021, broadcaster and syndicated columnist Larry Elder noted how Twitter is not inclined to suspend or ban liberals and leftists for spreading misinformation that could potentially lead to civil unrest. Wrote Elder:

Shortly after two mass shootings in March 2021 — one in Boulder, Colorado, and another in Atlanta, Georgia — had killed a combined total of 18 people, Newsweek magazine drew Twitter’s attention to four particular tweets that had incorrectly identified the killer in Boulder as a white Christian male, when in fact he was a Muslim who hailed from Syria. Newsweek wanted to know if the four posts were in violation of Twitter’s policy that banned “misinformation.” Key excerpts from the four tweets were as follows:

“The Tweets referenced are not in violation of the Twitter Rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told Newsweek. “We will not take action on every instance of misinformation. Currently, our misinformation rules cover COVID-19 misinformation, synthetic and manipulated media, and civic integrity.” (“Civic integrity” policies forbade things like “false claims that the 2020 U.S. election was rigged.”)

Twitter Suspends a Leftist, Naomi Wolf

In early June 2021, Twitter suspended the account of author and former Bill Clinton adviser Naomi Wolf, claiming that Wolf, who had amassed more than 140,000 Twitter followers over the years, had used the platform to share misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. In March, for example, Wolf had stated that plans to create a “vaccine passport” would imperil Americans’ civil liberties. “It is not about the vaccine,” she told Fox News on March 28, “it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data. Once this rolls out, you don’t have a choice about being part of the system.” Wolf likened such a system to the “social credit system” that the Chinese Communist Party employs to punish dissenting viewpoints or opinions critical of the regime in Beijing.

Twitter Is Sued by Former President Trump

On July 7, 2021, former President Donald Trump announced that he, as the lead plaintiff, was launching, on behalf of the victims of “cancel culture,” a class action lawsuit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Specifically, Trump said he was demanding the end of “shadow banning” and “blacklisting,” and that “we are asking the court to impose punitive damages on these social media giants.” “There is no better evidence that big tech is out of control than the fact that they banned the sitting President of the United States earlier this year, a ban that continues to this day,” he added.

In a speech he delivered at the annual CPAC conference on July 11, 2021, Trump said the following about his lawsuit:

The Biden Administration Admits Its Collaboration with the Social Media Giants, Meaning That They Are Government Actors

At a July 15, 2021 press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the Biden administration was actively identifying “problematic” posts for Facebook to censor or purge because they contained “misinformation” about COVID-19. “We are in regular touch with the social media platforms,” she stated, “and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff and also members of our COVID-19 team — given [that] this is a big issue, of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.” “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office,” Psaki added. “We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” “Facebook,” in turn, “needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts,” said Psaki.

At the same press briefing, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said “we’re asking [social media companies] to consistently take action against misinformation superspreaders on their platforms.” “Misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added. “Health misinformation has led people to resist wearing masks in high-risk settings. It’s led them to turn down proven treatments and to choose not to get vaccinated. This has led to avoidable illnesses and deaths.”

The New York Post noted that Psaki’s and Murthy’s professed concern about “misinformation” could be used — by the government and its social-media allies — as a pretext for censoring free speech and silencing all dissent — even if the dissidents were in fact correct in what they were saying:

John Coale, the attorney who was in the midst of filing lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, and Google on behalf of Donald Trump, said that the Trump lawsuits would ultimately prove that the tech companies “are government actors” and that “therefore, the First Amendment does apply” — i.e., it requires them to permit freedom of speech without censorship that is supposedly rooted in a desire to stop “misinformation.”

To Hide Biden’s 2021 Border Crisis, Twitter Censors a 2017 Journalistic Video on Horse Patrol Units

During the week of September 19, 2021 – by which time more than 14,000 Haitians had recently gathered under the Del Rio International Bridge on the banks of the Rio Grande in hopes of gaining approval for asylum in the U.S. — the media were abuzz with accusations claiming that Border Patrol agents were using whips to prevent those Haitians from illegally entering the United States. Specifically, the controversy was sparked by photographs of agents mounted on horseback attempting to corral incoming migrants. Some photos showed the agents twirling their reins to coax the horses in certain directions. Many critics misidentified the reins as whips that were being used to harm and degrade the migrants.

Paul Ratje, the photographer responsible for the images in question, said that neither he nor any of his colleagues had seen Border Patrol agents whipping anyone. “Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses, and that’s when the whole thing happened,” Ratje explained. “I never saw them whip anyone. The agent was swinging the reins that to some can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the pictures.”

Rowdy Ballard — who, prior to retiring, had spent 17 years on horseback for the Border Patrol and had served 6 years as the horse coordinator for Del Rio, Texas — told Fox News: “We all have the same message: we don’t carry whips.” Explaining that the Border Patrol does not train its agents to whip illegal migrants, and that those agents hardly ever place their hands on people “unless they’re not compliant,” Ballard said on America’s Newsroom: “It was a tense situation. The horses were a little reluctant to do the job that the agents were asking… twirling the reins was just another tool they used to get the horses to do what they’re asking.”

Notwithstanding the fact that the “whipping” claims were entirely false, the Biden Administration quickly announced that: (a) horse patrols at the border would be immediately suspended pending further investigation of the charges, and (b) the specific agents in the aforementioned photos would remain on administrative duty while the probe was being conducted. Biden’s announcement prompted Rowdy Ballard to say: “The horse is a great tool we’ve used [at the Border Patrol] for almost 100 years now. And with that going, it’s going to be harder to patrol that area.”

President Biden said in response to the (false) reports: “It was horrible [what] you saw. To see people treated like they did [sic]. Horses nearly running people over and people being strapped.” “It’s outrageous,” he added. “I promise you those people will pay. They will be investigated. There will be consequences.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that President Biden and his entire Administration were “horrified by the photos of the Border Patrol officers and that behavior.” “We feel those images are horrible and horrific,” she added.

Vice President Kamala Harris said she was “outraged” by the “horrible and deeply troubling” images shown in the photos. “Human beings should not be treated that way,” she elaborated, “and as we all know, it also evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.”

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that a full investigation was warranted. “One cannot weaponize a horse to aggressively attack a child,” he stated. “That is unacceptable. That is not what our policies and our training require. Please understand, let me be quite clear, that is not acceptable. We will not tolerate mistreatment, and we will address it with full force based on the facts that we learn.”

On September 28, 2021, The Daily Signal reporter Kelsey Bolar revealed what Twitter had done to cover up the lies inherent in the Biden Administration’s account of what had happened between the Border Patrol and the Haitian migrants:

Twitter Suspends the Account of PJ Media for “Misgendering” Rachel Levine

In October 2029, Twitter suspended the account of PJ Media as punishment for having post a tweet that cited an article in which PJ Media writer Matt Margolis rejected the Biden Administration’s recent assertion that transgender HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine was the “first-ever female four-star admiral” of the U.S. Public Health Services (USPHS) Commissioned Corps. “Even if you believe that gender is a social construct and subject to how one feels and not dependent on biology, sex chromosomes determine whether an individual is male or female,” said Margolis. “Rachel Levine is 100 percent male, right down to his DNA. He is not a female. He may have grown his hair out and changed his name to a woman’s name, but that doesn’t make him a female.” Twitter said that the suspension would continue indefinitely unless PJ Media agreed to delete the offending tweet and admitted that it had violated Twitter’s terms of service.

New Twitter Rule Bans the Dissemination of Memes & the Mockery of Public Figures

On November 30, 2021 — one day after Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey resigned and was replaced as CEO by Parag Agrawal — Twitter announced a new set of rules that effectively banned the dissemination of memes and the mockery of public figures. The new policy read as follows:

In short, the new policy empowered Twitter to unilaterally justify the removal of any content it might deem – for whatever subjective reason — “irrelevant,” not in the “public interest,” or of no “value to public discourse.” That is, Twitter tacitly acknowledged that it is a publisher that makes editorial decisions about its content, rather than a public forum for the free and open exchange of ideas.

Twitter Suspends Republican Lawmaker for “Hateful Conduct” After She Tweets in Opposition to Biological Males Competing in Women’s Sports

On February 28, 2022, Twitter suspended the account of Republican Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler of Missouri for “hateful conduct” after she tweeted her opposition to biological males claiming to be transgender women and competing in women’s sports. “Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women,” wrote Hartzler from her official Twitter campaign account in a reference to University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been dominating women’s college swimming.

A spokesperson for Twitter told Fox News that if Hartzler were to delete the tweet in question, her account would be reinstated within 12 hours. “The [Hartzler] Tweet you [Fox News] referenced violated the Twitter Rules on hateful conduct,” said the spokesman. “The account owner will need to delete the violative Tweet and spend 12 hours in read-only mode before regaining full access to their account. Per that policy, we prohibit targeting others 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.”

A Hartzler campaign spokesman subsequently told Fox News that the congresswoman had no intention of deleting the purportedly offensive tweet. Said the spokesman in a statement: “[Russian President] Vladimir Putin is a murderous psychopath who invaded a sovereign nation causing death and destruction, and is currently allowed to tweet. Yet, Twitter believes the bigger threat is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee saying women’s sports are for women. It’s shameful, utterly ridiculous, and a horrible abuse of censorship by big tech giants to stifle free speech.”

Twitter Suspends Charlie Kirk, The Babylon Bee, & Tucker Carlson

On March 15, 2022, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was suspended from Twitter for commenting on USA Today‘s choice of the biological male (transgender female) Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, as its “Woman of the Year.” Kirk’s offending tweet read: “Richard Levine spent 54 years of his life as a man. He had a wife and a family. He ‘transitioned’ to being a woman in 2011, Joe Biden appointed Levine to be a 4-Star Admiral and now USA Today has named ‘Rachel’ Levine as a ‘Woman of the Year.’ Where are the feminists?”

On March 20, 2022, the Christian satire site The Babylon Bee mocked USA Today for having recently declared the biological male (transgender female) Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, as its “Woman of the Year.” “The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine,” said the headline of The Babylon Bee article. Twitter, alleging that The Babylon Bee headline and article violated the platform’s prohibition against “hateful conduct,” then locked The Babylon Bee’s account for 12 hours on the condition that the account’s administrators delete the offending tweet. Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said in response: “We’re told our account will be restored in 12 hours, but the countdown won’t begin until we delete the tweet that violates the Twitter Rules. We’re not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.” Soon thereafter, Twitter also locked the accounts of The Babylon Bee‘s editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, and its founder, Adam Ford. And on March 23, 2022, Twitter denied The Babylon Bee‘s appeal of the suspension.

On March 23, 2022 as well, Twitter locked Fox News host Tucker Carlson out of his account for simply posting screenshots of the tweets, cited immediately above, by the Babylon Bee and Charlie Kirk, and stating that “both these tweets are true.”

Elon Musk Buys & Privatizes Twitter, Pledging to Make It a Forum for Free Speech

On April 25, 2022, multibillionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, purchased Twitter Inc. for $44 billion in cash, a total equaling $54.20 per share price. Though Twitter’s board of directors initially sought to prevent Musk from buying out the company with his unsolicited offer, their calculus changed after Musk disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that he had secured more than $46.5 billion in financing to make the purchase, including $21 billion of his own money plus $13 billion from Morgan Stanley and $12.5 billion from other banks.

Calling himself a free speech absolutist, Musk explained the motivation behind his decision to purchase Twitter: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

On July 8, 2022, Musk announced that he was unilaterally terminating the agreement by which he had planned to acquire Twitter. He explained his decision by charging that the social media giant had refused to comply with Musk’s requests for spambot account data and thus was in “material breach” of the agreement. In response to Musk’s announcement, Twitter board chair Bret Taylor pledged to take legal action to force Musk to follow through with the acquisition. Twitter formally launched that lawsuit on July 12.

In early October of 2022, Musk again reversed his position and announced that he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. After the deal was officially finalized on October 27, 2022, Musk, as one of his first moves as the new head of Twitter, fired several of the company’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety. According to an October 27 report in the Daily Wire: “Gadde oversaw many content moderation decisions [for Twitter], drawing criticism from conservatives and Republicans for a censorship-heavy approach, and was heavily involved in the decision to kick off former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 [2021] Capitol riots.”

The Twitter Files: Musk Exposes Twitter’s Enormous Leftwing Bias

After Elon Musk took control of Twitter and fired most of its upper-level management — as well as many of its rank-and-file employees — he pledged to release internal documentation that would show the enormous extent to which Twitter had shadow-banned and censored content from conservative sources. Over the ensuing weeks and months, that documentation was released to the public via the so-called “Twitter Files” — i.e., separate file dumps published by various journalists whose integrity Mr. Musk trusted and respected: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson. To view The Twitter Files — as compiled and presented by the managing editor of StoppingSocialism.com, Jack McPherrin — click here.

Twitter Employees Donate 99% to Democrats

On April 27, 2022, Fox News reported:

“Twitter employees are maintaining their torrid pace of 99 percent of their political donations pouring into Democratic campaigns and committees for the midterm elections, filings show. The partisan skew of Twitter employees’ donations illustrates the uphill battle facing Elon Musk, who has pledged to make the company ‘politically neutral’ in order to maintain trust.

“Individuals employed by the social media giant have disbursed 1225 donations through ActBlue, the Democrats’ central fundraising platform, totaling $72,296, Federal Election Commission records show. Meanwhile, just ten donations from Twitter employees were pushed through WinRed, the Republicans’ fundraising platform, for $505 through the end of March, according to the filings. This means that Twitter employees have maintained their astronomical pace of 99 percent of their contributions going towards Democratic campaigns and committees with just over six months until the 2022 elections.”

Twitter Executives Admit Twitter’s Leftist Bias in Videos with Undercover Reporters

In a video that was made public by Project Veritas (PV) in May 2022, Twitter executive Alex Martinez (AM), a lead client partner for the company, was secretly recorded condemning Elon Musk, mocking Musk for having Asperger’s Disease, and confirming Twitter’s leftist bias to an undercover reporter from PV. Among Martinez’s more noteworthy remarks were the following:

“These are the policies we’ve put in place for misinformation or mislabelling media.”
“It’s going to be hard for him [Musk] to be like, ‘oh, because people should make their own decision.’ It’s like, no, people don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out — correct things that are supposed to be out in the public, right?”
“He has Asperger’s. So he’s special. You’re special needs. You’re literally special needs. So I can’t even take what you’re [he’s] saying seriously.”
“Elon Musk as a person is whatever. I don’t- like, he’s a loony toon. He has- he has Asperger’s.”
“He has Asperger’s… So he’s special. We all know that. And That’s fine. So here, no wonder he’s going to say some fucking crazy shit because he’s special.”
“Advertisers are freaking out because of what he’s like tweeting about. Like, being, like, I want free speech, yada yada yada. Like, who really knows what that even means?”
“As an advertiser, as my business is what I do every day and why I go out is, like, we want it [Twitter] to be as fair and transparent and accurate as possible. And if that means there’s a level of censorship to make it correct. Quote unquote. And what does correct mean? I guess, like, it just kind of goes into the idea of, like, well, what is correct? Every idea of like – you know, it’s kind of like the principal of being good and bad. Like, good and bad exists, and it’s either bad or it’s good. It isn’t – it’s not like it’s a mix of good and bad. It’s like one or the other. And it’s kind of like the same idea of like, is it truthful or is it lies? Or is it a mix of truth and lies? You know what I mean? And, like, where do you draw the line?”
“There are people that are going to try to push back as much as they can, because we are doing… the rest of us who have been here believe in something that is good for the planet, and not just to give people free speech.”
PV: “But what it really comes down to is: does Twitter care more about profit or ideology?”
AM: “Well, right now we don’t make profit. So it’s gonna say ideology, which is what has led us into not being profitable.”
PV: “Because of ideology?”
AM: “Well, if we’re implementing all these rules that they’re… and Elon wants to dismantle them. Then technically our ideology has led us to not making money, because we’re not making money. And Elon wants to turn it the other way so that we can make money. Do you get what I mean?”

In another video that was made public by Project Veritas (PV) in May 2022, Twitter senior engineer Sirushti Murugesan (SM) was likewise secretly recorded condemning Elon Musk and confirming Twitter’s leftist bias to an undercover reporter from Project Veritas. Among the more notable exchanges in the conversation were the following:

PV: “So do you think there is a difference between Twitter’s definition of free speech and Elon’s definition of free speech?”
SM: “Twitter does not believe in free speech. Elon believes in free speech.”
PV: “How does Twitter not believe in free speech?”
SM: “Because Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment, and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people. And Twitter does not believe in this value, as a platform. […] For example, if you bully a transgender, the right thinks it’s OK, the left does not. Ideologically it does not make sense because we’re actually censoring the right, and not the left. So, everyone on the right wing will be like, ‘bro, it’s okay to stay, just gotta tolerate it.’ The left will be like, no, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform. So it does that on the right. It is true. There is bias. It is what it is today.”
PV: “What about us [Twitter employees]?”
SM: “Well, we’ll [we leftists will] feel less safer [with Musk at the helm]. It’s just like a spectrum. Like, I feel like, when — I don’t know the two parties can truly co-exist on one platform.”
PV: “What do your colleagues say about it [Musk’s takeover]?”
SM: “They hate it. Oh my God. I’m at least OK with it. Some of my colleagues are like super left, left, left, left, left.”
PV: “What do they say?”
SM: “They’re like, ‘this would be my last day if this happens’.”
PV: “Has much changed since Elon’s coming in?”
SM: “A lot has changed. A lot has changed. Like, we’re stress eating a lot. Like we’re always worried for our jobs.”
PV: “Why are you guys so worried though?”
SM: “You know, our jobs are at stake. He’s a capitalist and we weren’t really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist. Like we’re all commie as f***. Like, I started working at Twitter and became left. I think it’s just like the environment, like you’re there and you become like this commie. They call it Commiefornia for a reason. …”
PV: “How would you describe communism inside Twitter?”
SM: “It’s just a phrase. But essentially like everyone gets to do whatever they want, no one really cares about like OPEX (operating expenses) — like capitalists, they care about numbers, about how to make the business more efficient. But in Twitter, it’s like mental health is everything, like if you are not feeling it, you can take a few days off. People have taken months off, they will come back. And that’s the culture and you know, we’ll run the business as much as possible. But at the same time, you know, like the profits weren’t a lot. Capitalists would be like: ‘You’ve gotta try to make profits or you’re out.’ A lot of people won’t survive in that culture. Lot of companies don’t follow that culture.”

Twitter Bans the Word “Groomer”

In July 2022, Twitter announced that describing transgender or non-binary people as “groomers” was now in violation of its hate speech policy. “We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice, or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized,” said Twitter’s health product communications lead, Lauren Alexander. “For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals or groups with abuse based on their perceived membership in a protected category. Use of this term is prohibited under our Hateful Conduct policy when it is used as a descriptor, in context of discussion of gender identity.”

Twitter Unpersons James Lindsay

In August 2022, Twitter placed a lifetime ban on the account of scholar and activist James Lindsay^[4] — an account called @ConceptualJames — for the offense of criticizing people who encouraged confused children to undergo irreversible sex-reassignment surgeries, get sterilized, and take puberty-blocking drugs that could permanently damage their bodies. Specifically, Lindsay disparaged those in favor of performing such radical procedures on young people as “groomers” and “child sexualization specialists.” In a letter notifying Lindsay of his punishment, Twitter stated: “VIOLATION FOUND [….] We suspended @ConceptualJames’s account for breaking our hateful conduct rule. We found they broke our hateful conduct rule through different reports we received about their behavior.” Further, Twitter claimed that Lindsay’s tweet had violated company policy by promoting “violence against, threaten[ing], or harass[ing] other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Musk Announces Amnesty for Previously Banned Twitter Accounts

On November 24, 2022, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced that most Twitter accounts that had been previously banned, would be restored the following week. This decision was in accord with the wishes expressed by some 3.1 million Twitter users who had recently participated in a poll wherein 72.4% of them said they favored a “general amnesty” for all suspended accounts that had not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” “The people have spoken,” Musk tweeted following the tabulation of results. “Amnesty begins next week.” He also posted the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to, “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Senate Report Shows How Federal Government Colluded with Big Tech to Rig the 2020 Election

On November 6, 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a bombshell report revealing how the federal government — on the pretext of aiming to combat “disinformation” — had collaborated in 2020 with lefist entities at universities and within Big Tech to censor leading opinion-shapers on social media in order to minimize Donald Trump’s chances of winning re-election. The report was titled “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.” Below are some key excerpts from its Executive Summary:

Footnotes:

Additional Resources:

The Twitter Files
By Jack McPherrin
Stopping Socialism.com
Last updated January 19, 2023

Overview

Background