MAGA world has loudly pointed to the incidents as concrete evidence of the vague conspiracy theories they have long pushed about social media giants trying to silence conservative voices. But to those who track MAGA personalities, it’s the logical result of the conservative online echo chamber weighing in on medical and scientific issues — a subject with stricter social media guidelines than typical political fare.
“The deletion of tweets is more moderation than a lot of these folks have ever been subject to online in previous iterations of their censorship narrative,” said Jared Holt, a reporter for the watchdog group Right Wing Watch. “Having those tweets pulled down is a very concrete example and an undeniable act of moderation,” Holt said.
The deletions have only emboldened conservative commentators, according to Lee Stranahan, a host for the Russian-government backed Sputnik Radio and a former White House correspondent for Breitbart News.
“There is stupid thinking about the Covid crisis,” he said. “However, what they’ve done by censoring these people is they’ve actually played right into the fears of the audience for this.”
The charge that social media discriminates against conservatives is hardly new.
In recent years, the issue even made its way to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have held several congressional hearings on the issue. At one, Republicans invited Diamond and Silk to testify about their allegations that Facebook had been trying to direct traffic away from their pages. Trump has regularly boosted these theories, even hosting a summit where he brought in several right-wing internet figures to complain they were the victims of “incredible bias” from Facebook and Google. President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has claimed that Instagram was preventing people from searching for his profile.
Yet these complaints are often based on questionable and ambiguous evidence — commentators could point to a deleted tweet here or there but not conclusively show an inherent bias by the platforms. Research into the matter has not found a political bias on platforms like Facebook.
But since the coronavirus took off, social media companies have taken proactive steps to regulate posts about the subject. Twitter, for instance, has been expanding its misinformation guidelines to cover increasingly broad categories of posts about the pandemic, including those that contradict guidance from leading health agencies. On Monday, the platform said it will also attach warning messages to tweets “containing disputed or misleading information” about coronavirus.
The heightened attention has caused predictable friction with a crew of conservative pundits who are used to the more freewheeling rules for typical MAGA political opinions — the Mueller investigation was a “hoax,” Hunter Biden has something to hide.
In February, Zero Hedge, a popular fringe website known for its conspiratorial posts, was banned from Twitter for violating the company’s anti-harassment rules for publishing the private information of a Chinese scientist who it said was responsible for the pandemic.
The next month, Clarke was among the first MAGA-world pundits to find himself on the wrong side of social media’s new Covid-19 rules — and, in his opinion, the right side of history.
After Twitter deleted several of Clarke’s tweets that claimed the coronavirus was “an orchestrated attempt to destroy CAPITALISM,” somehow connected to liberal billionaire investor George Soros, and urging businesses to stay open, Clarke took the opportunity to crow that he had been right all along.
“I AM LEAVING TWITTER DUE TO THEIR CONSERVATIVE SPEECH CONTROL. TOTALITARIAN BIGOTS,” he wrote in his Twitter bio.
The perception of a Big Tech censorship crackdown surged late last week when the Plandemic video was yanked from nearly all prominent platforms.
The video had been gaining steam in the world of Trump supporters — particularly among those critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert who drew the ire of Trump’s base for contradicting the president on scientific assessments.
But after YouTube pulled the video, Plandemic achieved an entirely new status.
“Obviously, this video attacking Dr. Fauci is not approved by the elites controlling the information to the masses,” wrote Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet known for occasionally perpetuating hoaxes.
Right Wing Watch’s Holt observed that this was MAGA’s version of the Streisand Effect, where an attempt to stifle access to information makes the information all the more alluring.
“All of a sudden, something like the Plandemic film can be presented as, ‘This is the film that has the information that they don’t want you to see. The people responsible for this, they’re trying to hide the truth,’” Holt said. “It becomes more of a forbidden knowledge.”
A similar effect occurred with Owens, a far-right commentator who has visited the White House. When Twitter briefly froze her account after she posted a tweet urging Michiganders to violate Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses, numerous MAGA allies — from Turning Point’s Benny Johnson to Student for Trump’s Ryan Fournier — leapt to her defense.
“It’s so weird that @Twitter would suspend @RealCandaceO for her support of Rights granted to all of us by the Constitution,” tweeted prominent MAGA pundit Carpe Donktum. ”It’s almost as if social media companies hate freedom.”
Source: politico.com
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