Twitter

Twitter really takes the cake on many fronts, the most obvious being the oppressive rules and legal policies since The Twitter Rules and Policies are over 60k words. That’s about five hours worth of reading, and that’s not including their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. However, there are more dangerous aspects of the company to explore, such as involvment with world governments and shadow banning practices.

Government

Perhaps the most disturbing part of BigTech in general is the established pattern of stifling voices and material that are critical of government. Twitter has certainly done its share. For example, on Christmas day in 2017, Twitter mysteriously removed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s account for a few hours. They also restricted his mother’s account about three weeks before he was arrested in 2019 and removed the @Unity4J account a couple months after his arrest (both of which were fully reinstated after significant public outcry).

In May 2020, Twitter appointed Li Fei-Fei to the Board of Directors. For those who are unfamiliar, she is the former Vice President of Google who allowed several unethical projects to move forward during her tenure including Project Maven (which helped the US government drone more efficiently) and Project Dragonfly (which helped China to censor more efficiently). She even helped the company open an AI research facility in Beijing (the surveillance capital of the world). Shortly after her appointment to Twitter’s BoD, several Chinese dissidents had their accounts suspended.

Shadow Banning

As early as February of 2016, sources confirmed to Breitbart that Twitter does in fact shadow ban. This was reinforced about two years later when Project Veritas published an undercover report that primarily exposed Twitter’s affinity for shadow banning. When 2020 rolled around, they literally added shadow banning to their ToS.

Misgendering

Twitter is also absurdly sensitive when it comes to misgendering and really any conversation around transgenderism. In November of 2018, Meghan Murphy was banned for tweeting “Men aren’t women tho.” They even suspened a professor of psychiatry for tweeting that it’s his belief that “Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder.” Free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd was banned in July of 2019 for calling a person who identified as a woman a “fat ugly man.”

Now one might think “Well, maybe Twitter is just trying to prevent bullying, so they don’t allow misgendering.” While that would still be bad, the reality is much worse. In November of 2019, journalist Andy Ngo was banned was hit with a 12 hour suspension for tweeting verifiably true crime statistics regarding trans people, meaning even uncomfortable facts might get an account suspended.