The day has finally come. Twitter rolled out new guidelines Monday for “hate speech,” and many Trump supporters think they will be the first to go.
According to the new rules on “abuse and hateful conduct,” users may not “promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
We’ve updated our rules around abuse and hateful conduct as well as violence and physical harm. These changes will be enforced starting December 18. Read our updated rules here: https://t.co/NGVT3qGFvg
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 17, 2017
Users also are prohibited from using “hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header,” and there is to be no targeted harassment toward a “protected” category.
What counts as “hateful” is up for debate, and the groups Twitter is relying on to make that determination have a strong left-wing bias.
In 2016, Twitter unveiled a “Trust & Safety Council” consisting of 40 “organizations and experts,” many of which are frequent critics of conservatives and Christians.
The groups include the homosexual-rights organization GLAAD, the Anti-Defamation League, the feminist organization Feminist Frequency and the Islamic organization the Wahid Institute.
In October 2017, tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter announced a partnership with the Anti-Defamation League to combat what it called “cyberhate.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s national director and CEO, formerly worked for the Obama administration as director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and previously served as director of the Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute.
As WND reported in 2011, the Aspen Institute is a social justice group funded by George Soros, dedicated to fighting what it calls “structural racism,” which it claims permeates the United States.
With groups and individuals like ADL and Greenblatt helping to determine policy, many conservatives and Trump supporters believe they will be purged while leftists will remain unsanctioned.
Twitter’s recent changes to its verification rules also indicate a double standard regarding the “far right” and the “far left.”
Until recently, white nationalists such as “alt right” figurehead Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler were verified by Twitter and given the “blue checkmark,” showing their accounts were legitimately linked to them, not imitators.
However, this blue checkmark was widely interpreted as a kind of ideological “endorsement” by Twitter itself and condemned by left-wing journalists.
“Twitter has a white-nationalist verification problem,” wrote Maya Kosoff in Vanity Fair on Nov. 9 in a piece representative of the mainstream media’s attitude.
As a result of the negative publicity, Twitter removed the verifications of Spencer, Kessler and other “far-right” figures and announced it would track the conduct of users “on and off Twitter” when considering verification.
As some commentators noted, it meant Twitter was now putting itself in the position of implicitly endorsing every verified user, at least to the point of not labeling their views “hateful.”
But some users still verified by Twitter would be considered “hateful,” especially by Jews and conservatives. For example, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan remains verified on Twitter, despite his well known anti-Semitic views.
Vulgar and violent rhetoric against conservatives, Christians, white people and President Trump is also spewed by verified users on the platform without consequence.
Twitter and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, also have a close relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Although commentators such as the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson have called Black Lives Matter a “hate group” linked to violence against police, Black Lives Matter was rewarded with an emoji on Twitter, an all but official endorsement of the group.
All of this is taking place in the context of increasing censorship of conservatives by tech giants under the guise of combatting “hate.” As WND reported earlier this month, the National Religious Broadcasters group has identified more than 30 instances of corporate censorship against Christians and conservatives.
Left-wing journalists are cheering the upcoming purge. For example, Vox’s Aja Romano is hoping “helpful Twitter elves came in the night and kicked all the white supremacists off the platform while we slept.”
In contrast, many nationalists and conservatives are looking to transition to Gab, an alternative free speech platform. However, mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times have already targeted the site with a hit piece mocking it as “buggy and confusing” and celebrating how venture capitalists are steering clear of alternative platforms.
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