“@Jack We will start a rival service if this keeps up because @Wikileaks & our supporters are threatened by a space of feudal justice.”482
Jack Dorsey finally responded, “@Wikileaks all fair points. We are working to get here.”483
Before they had actually banned Milo, Twitter “unverified” his account,484 removing the coveted blue checkmark found on celebrities’ social media accounts which confirm that it is in fact them and not a fan account or someone impersonating them. Having a verified social media account has some prestige to it because the person is seen as popular enough or “important” enough to warrant having such special treatment.485 So unverifying Milo was a step trying to take away from his status and growing popularity.
Meanwhile, countless Black Lives Matter supporters call for killing cops, and crazy liberals repeatedly called for mass shootings at Donald Trump campaign events and for killing white people; and even to assassinate President Trump.486 Throughout 2016 I documented repeated instances like this on my YouTube channel.487
Twitter was sued by an American woman whose husband was killed by an ISIS attack in Jordan where he was working as a contractor for what she alleged was providing material support to terrorists because so many radical Muslims were posting ISIS propaganda. The lawsuit claimed, “Without Twitter, the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible.”488 Twitter even verified the account of the Muslim Brotherhood which has been designated a terrorist organization in several countries, and allows an account dedicated to Hamas, the radical Palestinian Sunni-Islamic organization which has almost 50,000 followers.489
When rapper Azealia Banks threatened to have Sarah Palin gang raped by a bunch of black men, Twitter didn’t penalize her account.490 Banks had also bullied and harassed a child actor from the Disney Channel, but again there was no action taken to even temporarily suspend her account.491 It was only after she called One Direction singer Zayn Malik a “faggot” that her account was suspended.492
Meanwhile, after I posted a meme saying there were only two genders, I was sent an email from Twitter’s Support department encouraging me to delete the tweet and saying my account was under review to see if I violated their no “hateful conduct” policy.
James O’Keefe had his account temporarily suspended shortly after he announced he would release a new undercover investigation into a democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate.493 O’Keefe’s Project Veritas organization would later release damning footage of democrat operatives discussing voter fraud and planning to use stink bombs at an inaugural ball which led to several arrests.494 The Drudge Report’s tweets have been censored using the “sensitive content” filter,495 and at least 32 of Donald Trump’s tweets encouraging people to get out the vote in key battleground states like Florida and Wisconsin vanished shortly after he posted them and couldn’t be seen unless you had their exact URLs.496
Twitter suspended World Net Daily’s account for 12 hours because of a tweet including a link to a story they wrote about former DNC chair Donna Brazile allegedly being upset that a private investigator had been hired to look into the murder of Seth Rich. He was a DNC staffer who many suspect may have been the person who leaked DNC insider emails to Wikileaks shortly before the election.497
Twitter even suspended the account of a Christian mother for posting ‘homophobic’ remarks for denouncing an article in Teen Vogue instructing kids on how to have anal sex with each other.498
Since banning Milo Yiannopoulos caused #FreeMilo to become the number one trend from all his supporters tweeting their criticism of his ban, Twitter began “shadow banning” popular conservative accounts which covertly limits the visibility of their tweets to others.499 It’s a more subtle way of censoring someone since their account isn’t getting shut down and specific tweets aren’t causing their account to get suspended, so the tactic of shadow banning quietly restricts the reach that the user has. This seems to be the new preferred method of cracking down on conservatives because this “soft censorship” doesn’t raise as many alarms because as you can imagine when a popular user gets suspended, people notice and then start aggressively spreading the word on Twitter about the latest victim of censorship.
Twitter also experimented with locking accounts temporarily if people tweeted profanity to celebrities.500 They appear to have abandoned this method in favor of enabling mute lists and automatic profanity filters that users can activate which will prevent any tweet with profanity or custom words or phrases of their choice from showing up in their feed.
They also enabled block lists, which have been compiled by different groups, and once added to a person’s account automatically block hundreds, or even thousands of users, based on any number of criteria.501 If someone blocks you, then they won’t get any notifications when you tweet to them, and you can’t access their feed to see their tweets. Some people I’m blocked by include Rosie O’Donnell, CNN’s Jim Acosta, actress Leslie Jones, singer John Legend, model Chrissy Teigen, Tonight Show band leader Questlove, the DJ Moby, rapper Ice T, Andrew Dice Clay, Amy Schumer, and many more.
Twitter admitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that they estimated over 23 million of their active user accounts were “bots,” or fake accounts run by automated computer programs which then post spam or are used by people who buy followers so they can look more popular than they are.502 A later study put the number at almost 48 million bots, or between 10% to 15% of the active accounts on the platform.503
A lot of bots have an attractive and scantly clad girl as the profile picture and do nothing other than respond to tweets which use certain keywords by posting a scripted message along with a link to a porn site, or have the porn site linked up on the account’s bio hoping to dupe people into visiting it after getting their attention from the bot responding to their tweets. Of course Twitter attempts to detect and shut down these porn bot accounts, but it is an ongoing battle.
After Bruce Jenner announced ‘her’ new name, someone set up the @She_Not_He bot on Twitter which would tweet a response to anyone who referred to Caitlyn Jenner as a he, to “politely correct” them.504 About 10,000 tweets were sent from the account before it was shut down.505 This bot was obviously created by a social justice warrior who wanted to defend ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and shows how they can be used for propaganda purposes.
Bots are also used by services that sell ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ that some people buy hoping to appear as if they have more ‘fans’ than they actually do.506 In the social media world, how many ‘likes’ a post has is often seen as a measuring stick of how ‘popular’ someone is, and people looking to build up their personal “brand” sometimes resort to these deceptive practices by using bots or ‘click farms’ located in poor countries which literally just pay people to like and retweet things.507 The more “engagement” a tweet has, the more likely Twitter’s algorithm is to place it at the top of search results for certain keywords or when someone clicks on a link to one of the top ten trending topics. Unlike bots, click farms use actual humans to do the ‘liking’ and retweeting, but the effect is the same. They give the false impression that posts are more popular than they actually are.
The more bots that tweet out a certain keyword or hashtag, the more likely those topics will start trending. So if a person, a political activist group, or a marketing agency wanted a certain topic to show up on the top ten trending list, then using bots could likely help make that happen. Then the issue, topic, or wannabe celebrity’s name would be brought before the eyes of everyone who happens to look at the trending module.