Yes, Twitter is biased against conservatives and the right

Note: Consider this something of a first draft. I intend to add more references, include other good points, and improve the presentation.

That Twitter is biased against us on the right, and that that's a big problem, is something that's been clear to us for a long time now. It's not widely accepted though. When the issue comes up the point is often sneered at, with mainstream media claiming otherwise in news articles, opinion pieces, and so-called fact-checks. It's something we could really do with a proof for: a single reference that reviews the evidence and that can be shown to people to convince them that Twitter is in fact biased. There's been at least one attempt at it that I'm aware of (Quillette) but I haven't been able to find anything I'd be confident sharing with people with the expectation that it would satisfactorily put the issue to rest, so consider this a serious attempt at the definitive piece on the issue.

This piece has been in work for a long time now as well and there have been a lot of developments on the issue since I first started thinking about it. At one point the bias may have been harder to prove, but during the 2020 US presidential election when Twitter joined with other social media platforms in blocking the New York Post from sharing their stories based on Hunter Biden's laptop, even suspending their account for some time — on highly spurious charges, as explained below — it seemed that the issue had been put to rest. People have short memories though, and the idea that these platforms are biased continues to be disputed, so this piece is still very necessary.

So, precisely how is Twitter biased? Twitter is biased in both the enforcement of its Terms of Service (ToS) — e.g. violent, hateful, and dehumanizing speech often only get punished one way — and the definition of the ToS itself — e.g. it's highly favorable to the trans issue and it accepts the left's hierarchy of identities/ethnicities (i.e. PoC and LGBT over whites and straights). This can be easily demonstrated, but even if it couldn't, there'd be very good reason to suspect that they are biased based on the politics of the company and the people who work there and by the composition of the platform's userbase (it's very left-wing) alone. There's little reason for anyone to deny that Twitter is biased beyond the reluctance of those on the left and apologists for the status quo with respect to these social media companies to admit that there's a major free speech issue affecting their political opponents.

The effect of this bias is considerable. Twitter is the premiere platform for news and politics today. Its user base is a small share of the general population but very disproportionately made up of the most politically active people. Many of the biggest stories of the past few years either started as or were heavily supported by hashtags — e.g. #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, etc. Twitter is where politics happens, it's where all big politicians/leaders and important figures release statements, argue with each other, and share their views, and the news itself often comes from what people say on Twitter. Eventually I plan on having more on this in the next piece in this series, Why Twitter Matters, all that matters for now though is that the reader understand that considerable real-world harm does come from this — e.g. it makes organizing, a critical activity in politics, impossible; and it deprives us of a voice on a critical platform that functions as the modern day public square (that on steroids) and serves as the media's go-to source for public opinion.

So how do we know that Twitter is biased? Before covering the issue more exhaustively, let's review the New York Post-Hunter Biden incident, one conclusive example of their bias in practice.

Hunter Biden and the censoring of the New York Post

It should be clear, the story itself is not the issue here but Twitter and other social media companies' handling of it. Hunter Biden was a popular target of conservatives during the 2020 presidential election and reactions to the story will vary by political persuasion of course. What's notable is the bizarre, ridiculously censorious way it was handled by Twitter and other social media, which they've since even admitted was wrong — though not to the point there's been any serious soul-searching on the issue, it's more just framed in terms of there being a "lack of clarity" on their policies.

As the story goes, Rudy Giuliani, working as part of the Trump 2020 campaign, got his hands on the contents of a laptop of Hunter Biden. They claimed it was left at a computer repair shop for repairs but then abandoned, and the store owner then shared it with Giuliani. Probably the biggest story to come of it was the claim that an email from the files provided some proof that Hunter had leveraged his connections with his father as Vice President in his work with Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company.

The fallout was unprecedented, and bizarre. Social media companies freaked out and the story was effectively mass censored off the Internet (it could still be found by going directly to their site but it was wiped off social media where the vast majority of engagement occurs these days). Twitter locked the New York Post's account, preventing them from using it for weeks, and even banned all users from posting links to the story. Social media companies came up with the justification that it was hacked material and then added a rule against that to their Terms of Service (ToS), but there's no proof that the material was obtained through hacking, it's a questionable rule anyway, and it's clear they were just reacting to a story hostile to Biden. The context helps to explain things: there had been a years-long panic over Russian meddling since the 2016 election and these companies had been pressured into being hypervigilant on any sort of surprise anti-Democratic candidate story based on suspiciously-gotten computer files, and they overreacted.

Let's review the justification Twitter provided for its censorship of the New York Post further, in case there's any doubt of their wrong here (and the reader should be reminded that they've admitted to having been wrong in doing this, as noted above). Journalism routinely relies on obtaining information through methods that are illegal for the source at least, like leaks from classified government documents that make for a common type of news story. Occasionally sources are caught and prosecuted — e.g. the Reality Winner case — but more often the leaks serve a mainstream agenda and it's both common and encouraged. That's the source though, it's almost unheard of for the journalists or news outlets involved to be treated as breaking the law or some rule of journalism. This sort of rule applied consistently would have presented huge problems for the news media that once shared the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, documents that were literally stolen from a break-in at a federal government building.

Worse, we know too that they're not even consistently against hacking. There was a major hack of social media platform Gab carried out earlier this year by activist left-wing hackers, and despite them admitting it was a hack (one that was almost certainly criminal in nature) carried out against a large population of American citizens not accused of any wrongdoing beyond being on the platform, their information was shared with news outlets (Wired) who freely posted about it on Twitter. 

Twitter's censorship of the New York Post and its articles was one of the clearest examples of their bias we've seen. It should be noted too that the New York Post is one of the oldest newspapers in the country. If an outlet as well-known and established as that would get this treatment, imagine what smaller outlets and lesser-known commentators can expect.

The baked-in bias of Twitter's ToS and double standards in enforcement

One of the best reasons we know that Twitter is biased is because its rules (i.e. the Terms of Service, or ToS) are inherently biased, as designed. To take just one example, in response to activist demands, Twitter has made "misgendering" and "deadnaming" (what they call referring to a trans person's name before they transitioned) bannable offenses. Despite how they're presented, these are not reasonable rules at all. It makes it literally impossible to talk about the history of a transgender person before they transitioned, no matter how famous their accomplishments (e.g. Bruce Jenner winning the Decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics) or infamous their past (a popular Democratic Party-aligned commentator managed to bury their past offenses by transitioning). These rules effectively kill all debate on the transgender issue, something that first received widespread attention just a handful of years ago and is the subject of ongoing debate in mainstream politics.

Then there's the gaping double standards based on the identities of the people involved and the direction of the attack. Embarrassingly for the companies and people who support such enforcement, neutral/"race-blind" application of universal rules has led to too many people of color (PoC) and other so-called marginalized groups being affected. Despite this being presented as some sort of mistake, it's a natural consequence of those groups of people making widespread use of genuinely hateful language (Twitter is a very left-wing platform, with large and aggressive populations of black and trans people and they're far more likely to deliver abuse than take it). This then leads to demands that they enforce an explicit set of double standards, as described in the Washington Post. The article's subheading makes it as clear as possible: "The company is overhauling its algorithms that detect hate speech and deprioritizing hateful comments against Whites, men and Americans." This is amazingly taken as a good thing. Note too that though the article concerns Facebook, the other major social media platforms have followed, as detailed below.

Let's review Twitter's ToS (as of March 2021) in detail and show some examples of precisely where it's biased, both due to the explicit text of the rules and where enforcement can be expected to be discriminatory. A few sections stand out: Hateful conduct policy, Glorification of violence, and Violent organizations.

The Hateful conduct policy provides a supposed context that's common to all their rules:

Research has shown that some groups of people are disproportionately targeted with abuse online. This includes; women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, marginalized and historically underrepresented communities. For those who identify with multiple underrepresented groups, abuse may be more common, more severe in nature and more harmful.

As noted already, this framing of PoC and transgender people being innocent victims — i.e. only on the receiving end — of abuse on social media is nonsense. "Black Twitter" is a large, outspoken community on the platform well known for their maliciousness, making use of threats and engaging in targeted harassment of others all the time, and the huge population of trans users — Twitter seems to have one of the biggest communities of trans users of any major platform — aggressively use the service to destroy critics of their agenda, no matter how fair or minor, who they constantly smear as "TERFs." This is just an excuse they've come up with to justify their biased policy, and as shown, it's not remotely fair.

Under "Incitement against protected categories" there's plenty of problematic stuff. This part,

to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category, including asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities, e.g., “all [religious group] are terrorists.”

would make it impossible to accurately describe a group as more likely to commit a particular type of crime or violence, no matter the facts. Clearly these people don't have a problem with blaming groups for dangerous or illegal activities in general as there's been a ton of that through the COVID-19 pandemic. The rules explicitly state that it only applies against "protected categories," so it's by definition biased. And this part,

to incite others to discriminate in the form of denial of support to the economic enterprise of an individual or group because of their perceived membership in a protected category, e.g., “If you go to a [religious group] store, you are supporting those [slur], let’s stop giving our money to these [religious slur].” This may not include content intended as political in nature, such as political commentary or content relating to boycotts or protests.

seems bizarrely worded to defend one sort of boycotting while denying another. Then there's the bit on the use of slurs, epithets, and "tropes," where it again notes that it only applies to a "protected category," meaning that PoC and LGBT minorities can say whatever hateful things they want about others.

The Glorification of violence and Violent organizations policies present a problem for a platform that's responsible for the Black Lives Matter movement and that continues to celebrate it with its own custom hashtag. Despite the overwhelmingly favorable media coverage it receives these days, BLM is a violent and destructive movement, with the implicit threat of such things in its most popular slogans like "no justice, no peace." BLM has a long history of destructive riots of an insurrectionist nature (they literally torched a police station in Minneapolis just last year) and can even be tied to at least two separate massacres of police officers in the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings. When you have mainstream media on your side it's easy enough to either ignore or spin away these facts but by any objective standard, BLM should be just the sort of movement/group affected by these ToS rules.

Reading further, under Glorification of violence the rules state that "you can’t glorify, celebrate, praise or condone violent crimes." I checked Twitter after the Dallas police shooting happened (I think that night) and it was full of supportive tweets — completely supportive, giddy comments. It would take some effort to find and document all the responses but that shouldn't be surprising given the hard left, anti-police bias of the platform. Under Violent organizations policy they describe violent extremist groups as those who "have engaged in, or currently engage in, violence and/or the promotion of violence as a means to further their cause," which again clearly implicates BLM, but they have an out in that the rules also say that they have to somehow identify themselves as an "extremist group" to qualify, and clearly they're not that...because BLM and Twitter say so.

Permanent suspensions: Cataloging the damage

One of the most consequential forms of Twitter's discriminatory enforcement, and a common sight on the platform, is permanent suspensions (i.e. bans). Some times people will be allowed to keep their accounts if they delete offending posts, and this can be a form of direct censorship too, but permanent bans and the threat of that punishment are the ultimate tool they have for managing speech on the platform. Consider too that Twitter considers ban evasion to be a violation of its ToS so once you're banned, you're banned for life, with any account (there are ways around it but the user can never come back openly and there's almost always severe damage to their following, reach, and use of their account).

There are a few things that make documenting this problem difficult. One is that especially with the bigger account bans, there's often at least some justification for it, according to the ToS as written (and the bias of the ToS in design doesn't necessarily apply in some of these cases too). Bias can still be identified though in how those on the left have escaped similar punishment (e.g. a popular example among conservatives is Kathy Griffin holding up a mock severed Trump head, which would be an instant ban if it were Obama's head, or probably that of just about any Democrat). The other problem, and it's a big one, is that so much of the devastation from permanent suspensions applies to smaller accounts, and it's the right-wing of the right that's affected (i.e. the so-called far-right). This shouldn't be surprising — of course that's who'd be most affected, they even say that's who they're targeting. What matters though is that the left conveniently dismisses this as "banning Nazis," and as the reader has seen above with the trans issue, their framing is wildly misleading.

A list of just some of the bigger accounts to be banned follows.

• Milo Yiannopoulos was one of the first major bans of a prominent political commentator on Twitter and it was new and shocking enough at the time that it was a significant news story. He had been feuding with actress Leslie Jones, around the time of or not long after the Ghostbusters remake controversy. It was claimed that he had directed targeted abuse her way but it basically amounted to a fight between two public figures. Popular celebrities often have aggressive fan bases of their own and it's extremely common for someone's followers to pile on another person they're arguing with in the replies (the act of "ratioing" someone like this is common and celebrated all the time on Twitter). This is something they conveniently frame as harassment only when their favored people are on the losing end. The decision can probably be explained as being at least in part driven by business interests, in that they want celebrities (who are a sort of influencer) to use and enjoy the platform, but it's been clear all along that Twitter is a critical platform for political speech in democracies and they should not be silencing political commentators to defend movie stars for things that don't violate any universal standard. Milo Yiannopoulos, like many of the banned people, is a controversial figure, so keep in mind that the issue is Twitter's bias, and regardless of what people think of him, his case certainly makes for an example.

• Martin Shrkeli may be an even more hated person than Milo, but his permanent suspension was still unfair. He was banned after making a clear joke about Lauren Duca, an outspoken partisan commentator and Teen Vogue journalist who's been accused of abuse by colleagues herself. Without getting into the details, the character and actions of the people involved do not fit the claim that Twitter is protecting innocent victims from harassment, they're just siding with their favored classes of journalists and progressive women, LGBT people, and PoC.

• Alex Jones barely used his Twitter account, having his own media empire where he built up his name over several decades. In that sense he's probably one of the few victims to not be seriously affected by his ban, but that also means that it made little sense. The media had been gunning for him at the time and they dug up old tweets to justify the ban. It was clear though that his banning was preordained and a deep dive done to find whatever evidence they could use to support it.

• Roger Stone was banned for allegedly threatening CNN anchors. He was a big name and was silenced just after getting charged in the politically-motivated Mueller investigation, which was convenient for the establishment at the time.

• Gavin McInnes was banned for his association with and being the founder of the Proud Boys. This made even less sense at the time as they were tied to so-called far-right politics and the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally they had nothing to do with. There was no justification beyond that. His was probably one of the more unfair bans of a prominent figure, and this was even noted in mainstream conservative media at the time.

***

That covers just some of the biggest bans on Twitter, but as noted, the vast majority of the bans and probably most of the damage done falls on smaller, lesser-known accounts. It would be impossible to document all of these bans, and it's not easy to even just convey the significance of it. I've seen extensive lists of banned accounts but without knowing who those people are or just what they did to get suspended (it's very often nothing, as shown below), it could be hard for people to know what to make of it. There was a mass purging of accounts just recently (it happened in February or early March 2021), not linked to any behavior or alleged offense, and maybe the most that can be done is to report on these things as we've experienced them as best as possible.

Countless people, including even a number of mainstream bluecheck conservatives, reported losing huge numbers of followers. I lost about 20% of my followers on my own account (@DavidSharp84), and other people reported similar cuts to their follower counts. The banned included a lot of smaller accounts (there's no reason to think they were bots, and there's been no claim that's the case), but also some of the bigger and more popular accounts in our parts. There's no reason to think it was related to hate speech/groups and many of the banned were notable moderates and people more on the humor/meme side of things. What's likely to have happened is that Twitter targeted a wide range of accounts through "network"-finding algorithms, seemingly banning some arbitrary number of people, based not on any charge in particular but with the purpose of disrupting "hate networks," as activists frame it. I'm unaware of there being any press release on this, and the accounts were small enough that the mass purge may have passed without any/much mention in even conservative media. It's one of the more typical and consequential examples of Twitter's biased enforcement though.

This sort of censorship is very common and devastating to political organizing — again, which is exactly as intended. When it's justified at all it's presented as Twitter applying its ToS against hateful abuse but as shown above, there's nothing fair about it and it's often not even in response to anything at all.

Conclusion

In summary, Twitter is very biased against the right, the practical effect of it being the mass banning of accounts and widespread denial of access to a critical platform for politics in liberal democracies and elsewhere — it's often said that it's like being denied access to the modern day public square. One significant consequence is that politics has been made into an almost open goal game for the left on Twitter, with their point of view well represented all the time and opposing ones strictly prohibited. 

There's a lot more to say on why this matters. When ready, I plan on having this piece as part of a series, with a fuller discussion of this issue in the next piece, Why Twitter Matters, as well as an overview of potential solutions in a third and final article.