Has Twitter shadow-banned Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas? That’s the question being asked by reports at LifeSite News, PJMedia and others.
According to LifeSite News, it sure looks that way, citing blogger Ace at Ace of Spades via Instapundit:
“Shadowbanning” is a banning that’s hidden from the user. They don’t ban you outright, but they do block everyone except the people you most frequently interact with from seeing your tweets.
A while ago, when I was still on twitter, one of my snarky comments would get 20, 40 retweets, at minimum. Then one day many of my tweets would get zero retweets, or 3.
When Twitter suspended me, I didn’t bother getting unsuspended, because I knew they’d already blocked my tweets from 99% of all potential readers. So why bother even using their piece of [s—] data-exploitation antisocial media?
I would like Twitter to be quizzed heavily about this when they come before Congress to testify. Many conservatives are shadowbanned – Mollie Hemingway seems to be. Michelle Malkin seems to be.
And even Senator Ted Cruz seems to be.
If this is not actually an open forum, they ought to say so. It’s a simple matter of honest disclosure.
Monica Showalter said that the National Review’s Jim Geraghty describes how Cruz, with three million Twitter followers, “gets only a couple hundred retweets any time he says something there, while left-wing senator Kamala Harris, who has half his followers, gets thousands and thousands of retweets.”
Showalter adds:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
I did some further research to find out if there was any mitigating factor, checking how many of Cruz’s followers are fake. Fake followers probably wouldn’t retweet anything because they are bots and trolls and often used to pad follower figures to make a politician appear more influential than he or she is. The figure that this Twitter auditor came up with for Cruz was only 17% fake followers, meaning that 83% of Cruz’s 3 million followers are genuine, people who are following Cruz because they really want to hear what he has to say. I have followed and been followed back by Cruz for years, and yes, lately, I have not seen any Ted Cruz tweets. So my antennae are up. I too am one of the stiffed among his many followers.
Now let’s look at Harris. An audit of her Twitter followers shows that more than half (55%) of Harris’s followers are certified fake, according to Twitter audit. Check out the fakery yourself. Yet Harris still gets way more retweets and “likes” than Ted Cruz ever does, at least three times more, yet with only half the followers, and the landslide majority of them fake.
Let me add here that I also follow Cruz, and have been followed by him for quite some time, yet I haven’t seen any of his tweets in my personal feed for months.
So, Michael van der Galien asked at PJMedia, “what can be going on here? Well, it could be that many of Cruz’s followers simply never see his tweets. In that case, Twitter hasn’t banned him outright; it has simply made him more or less invisible. This practice is called ‘shadow banning.’ We know that Twitter uses this method to silence what it deems to be supposedly “controversial” conservative voices.”
He concludes:
Is Senator Cruz — one of the most vocal and well-known conservative politicians in America — being subjected to this treatment by Twitter? From the looks of it, it seems highly probable.
In a diary at RedState, Martin Knight goes even further, suggesting that perhaps Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may have been involved in the decision to shadow-ban Cruz:
Personally, I do not doubt, even for a moment, that Jack Dorsey was directly involved in that decision and that the upper echelons at Twitter are well aware that they are putting their thumbs on the scale in favor of his Democrat opponent. One has to wonder; if Twitter can shadow-ban someone with as large a following as Ted Cruz, there is not that many people Twitter would not happily sabotage.
Showalter correctly notes that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Twitter has immunity from lawsuits because it bills itself as neutral.
“Well, it’s not a neutral platform; it’s a highly partisan and edited platform,” Showalter added. ‘That means that it will need to edit every single thing that appears on its site for libel if it doesn’t want to be subject to suits. Already it’s under the gun from victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting as an enabler of terrorists – its devotion to partisan politics over being a neutral platform now opens the door wider to the lawsuits now, and regulation for all it’s getting away with in its juvenile little partisan gamesmanship.
‘They can quit it and unban Ted Cruz and let him be heard, or else it’s time for the legislators and the lawsuits. They can have it one way or the other, just not both. Ready, Ted?”
Keep in mind, if you will, that Twitter’s CEO endorsed a Medium post that called for the elimination of Republicans and conservative thought in a “new civil war.”
Related:
- Twitter CEO, board member promote post advocating one-party Democrat rule after winning ‘new civil war’
- Twitter suspends “alt-right” accounts because they helped elect Trump
- Christian filmmaker meets with Senate staffers over Twitter censorship, possible criminal activity
- Video of the Day: Steven Crowder discusses censorship on Twitter and YouTube
- Twitter suspends user for criticizing Maxine Waters
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. And be sure to check out our new MeWe page here.
If you appreciate independent conservative reports like this, please go here and support us on Patreon.
And if you’re as concerned about Facebook censorship as we are, go here and order this book:
