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jack-dorsey.jpg

Twitter Could Ban the Nazis Whenever It Wants, but It'd Rather Blow Trump All Day, Everyday

By Mike Redmond | Social Media | April 26, 2019 |

By Mike Redmond | Social Media | April 26, 2019 |


jack-dorsey.jpg

Republicans love working the ref. It’s practically their signature move at this point, and naturally, it plays like gangbusters with a base full of evangelical white people whose persecution complex is triggered at the slightest pushback to their worldview. For example, seeing gay and/or brown people not only exist, but asking for bare minimum levels of respect and decency. Can’t have that!

While conservatives constant crowing about liberal bias in the mainstream media has led to mind-numbing amounts of news coverage being reduced to that bland paste Morpheus’ crew eats in The Matrix — Tastes like both sides chicken! — you’ll probably be thrilled to learn that Republican’s favorite tactic also worked stupid easy on social media companies who are way more concerned with shoring up their user base than worrying about whatever damage their Orwellian glory holes are doing to the very perception of reality itself. Which happens when two of the biggest communication platforms in the world are run by privileged white nerds in San Francisco who stun goats in their backyard whenever they’re not taking a meditation pleasure romp through a humanitarian crisis.

Anyway, as we speak, Facebook is letting the goddamn Daily Caller handle fact-checking, which for the record is very bad, yet somehow downright quaint compared to the sh*t that Twitter’s been pulling. Earlier this week, CEO Jack Dorsey personally stopped by the White House to hold Donald Trump’s hand and tell him everything’s going to be alright after the president expressed grave concerns that he has less Twitter followers than Obama even though Trump is “so much better” at tweeting. Yup. After Dorsey explained how deleting bots can sometimes lower follower counts, he assured the president that Twitter loves having him on their platform and that the company is dedicated to protecting Republicans’ place in the “entire public conversation.”

About that…

Not long after Dorsey calmed the president’s fear that they wouldn’t go to prom together, Motherboard reported on internal discussions inside Twitter that show the company is bending over goddamn backwards to coddle Republicans. According to the report, employees asked why the company had phenomenal success banning ISIS accounts, but it couldn’t do the same with the rampant white supremacy plaguing the platform.

The answer was, uh, some sh*t.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

Just so we’re clear, Twitter engineers are fully aware that if they programmed a completely neutral and unbiased machine to look for white supremacy, the results are going to come back “GOP.” In other words, if you built a real-live Ultron and programmed him to eradicate racism, he’d pick up the White House and drop it on Fox News. So the next time conservatives complain about leftist media bias, never forget that Twitter is purposefully holding back an algorithm that would literally “Ban the Nazis, Jack” because they don’t want to hurt Republican’s feelings. That’s not working the ref. That’s having the ref play the game for you, and oh by the way, he has a gun.

(On a side note, I’m suddenly having distinct thoughts about how the only black guy in Terminator 2 built Skynet, which knowing what we know now about AI’s and squashing white supremacy, raises some very serious questions about the crazy-ass white people who shot up his home and ultimately got him killed. I dunno, something to think about.)

Because this timeline is an unrelenting gauntlet of demonic wangs, of course, the algorithm shenanigans wasn’t the last bit of Twitter puckering up for the president. Kayleigh dropped this little piece of goddammit into the Overlord Slack, and what the hell, Jack?

Jesus Christ, what’s the point of Sarah Huckabee Sanders anymore?

There’s maintaining an open forum of discussion, and then there’s being Trump’s errand boy. If I had to call up Ilhan Omar and tell her, “From my point of view, banning the president is evil!” I’d probably starve myself to death, too.



Header Image Source: Getty