Twitter’s Unlevel Playing Field

If you follow politics, you must surely know of Alex Jones and his Infowars platform.  He brought to the forefront Twitter’s refusal to enforce their own rules.  I once had a boss who was convinced that almost every far-fetched conspiracy theory was real.  Everything from the moon landing being faked to 9/11 being carried out by the U.S. government.  He couldn’t hold a candle to Alex Jones.  Then add to that Jones truly vile level of racism and a constant flow of bullying and harassment.  You get the picture.  In the past few days Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Linked In, MailChimp, and Apple have banned Jones from using their services.  All of them have different wording but basically, their rules don’t allow hate speech, threats, bullying or harassment.  Twitter has the same general  rules, but Del Harvey, their vice president of trust and safety stated the following:

“Twitter is reflective of real conversations happening in the world and that sometimes includes perspectives that may be offensive, controversial, and/or bigoted,” Harvey wrote. “While we welcome everyone to express themselves on our service, we prohibit targeted behavior that harasses, threatens, or uses fear to silence the voices of others.”

We have seen The Donald threaten to kill millions of people in North Korea with nuclear war.  We have watched him endlessly attack Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, mayor of London, the mayor of San Juan and too many more to list.  His constant picking at his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions and his assistant Rod Rosenstein, must surely be considered bullying.  The number of racist and sexist comments must number like grains of sand on the beach.

The CEO of Twitter doubled down on his defense of Alex Jones and by extension the President, as not breaking their rules on hate speech, threats, bullying, and harassment.  The truth of the matter has nothing to do with racism or rules.  You don’t shoot the goose who lays the golden eggs.  In this case the pair of geese.  Especially since most other social networks banned Alex Jones.  Twitter got millions of dollars in free promotional press as well as notification they are the only major player carrying Alex Jones Infowar’s content.  Trump has been the goose which has been giving for a long time and only increased in value since becoming President.  Twitter launched in 2006.  Trump joined in 2009.

 Much like certain positions in government, celebrity, and certain other circumstances give power to certain people.  Twitter’s reach to millions if not billions of users, is an incredibly powerful tool.  To have use of that to spread divisiveness not only of Americans, but people around the world based on religion or color is simply wrong.  Twitter’s choice to selectively hand the worst possible use of that outreach to hate mongering is just wrong.  Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, knows that it is wrong.  That is why he made the rules for the rest of us against it.  Yet another example of a man who sold his principles and his soul for a few dollars more.