Twitter Admits to Clandestinely Censoring in Favor of Clinton Campaign

P. Gardner Goldsmith | November 5, 2017
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The move by a Twitter employee last week to ban President Trump from the social media platform for 11 minutes received a great deal of attention and offered people a glimpse into how easily someone at Twitter can stop the flow of information from a source he does not like.

What did not get a great deal of attention, however, was the fact that Twitter’s Acting General Counsel, Sean Edgett, admitted in a prepared statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the platform regularly blocked tweets offering information that could paint the Clinton Campaign and DNC in negative lights.

Writing for NewsWars, Jerome Corsi notes:

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on Tuesday, Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel for Twitter, admitted in his prepared testimony that Twitter employed in the 2016 election algorithms that censored out hashtags critical (of) Hillary Clinton, including the hashtag #PodestaEmails and the hashtag #DNCLeaks.

Is anyone surprised?

Twitter execs long ago began showing their biases against conservatives to such an extent that even USA Today brought it up, noting that Twitter’s behind-the-scenes team was quick to ban right-wingers like Milo Yiannopoulos for digs he made at the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining actress Leslie Jones.

Yet, conservatives say, nothing happened to rapper Talib Kweli and his followers when they attacked black Breitbart reporter Jerome Hudson with racial slurs. When Breitbart contributor Kassy Dillon complained about a Twitter user who sent her harassing tweets and messages, Twitter made the perpetrator delete one tweet that suggested someone shoot Dillon in the head.

Now, the big story that many in the pop media evidently don’t want you to see is that Twitter actually admits to having censored tweets that might have spread real information injurious to HRC and the DNC during the 2016 election. The Twits claim that they were simply stopping “spambots’ from filling their precious space with tweets from unreal people (one might ask how authentic most politicians seem to be in the first place, but that’s a different matter), but hidden in their statements are some “tells” that indicate otherwise.

For example, Dr. Corsi observes that in sworn testimony to the Judiciary Committee, Edgett stated:

For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website.

So, automatically, what Mr. Edgett has admitted tells us that Twitter intentionally tried to stop the circulation of information offered by an authentic user, Wikileaks, offering authentic information that Wikileaks had published revealing real, confirmed e-mails sourced from John Podesta and the DNC. Those e-mails shed extremely important information about corruption within the DNC that worked against Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and in favor of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, and later revealed extremely important information about what Mrs. Clinton knew about the attempted overthrow of Syria and the underlying, unconstitutional reasons for the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.

Edgett also testified that Twitter hid 25% of the “#PodestaEmails” tweets, and

As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Those would be the e-mails that revealed towering corruption at the DNC and in many offices of pop media -- things like new reporters working with the Clinton campaign to offer her easy questions, things like Donna Brazile, then an employee of CNN, feeding Hillary questions prior to a debate with the electrifying wildman, Bernie Sanders.

These are issues that were real, and the more people knew about them, the more they disliked Mrs. Clinton – and the more she and the DNC hackmeisters pushed the spurious “Russia Hack” narrative to deflect from their own malfeasance.

And they are things that Donna Brazile is discussing in her scintillating new sleep aid – er, book – given the perfectly misleading title, “Hacks”, and in articles promoting it.

So what’s the takeaway from the revelation by Twitter’s lawyer?

Twitter is open to competition, which is being provided by new platforms that explicitly state they will not suppress political speech.

Hey, Twitter’s CEO and staff are free to run by their own rules. They can promote speech, suppress speech, whatever. But in a free market, they might want to at least be honest to people about their biases and actions. Customers tend to dislike sellers who are shady, especially those who are as shady as Mrs. Clinton and the DNC appear to have been.

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