Social media anti-conservative bias begin to backfire

IBD:

Twitter might soon have the government breathing down its neck for "shadow-banning" conservatives, while Facebook's market value has plunged more than $130 billion in just two days as the once-dominant social media site's growth goes flat amid charges of bias. Is this the beginning of the end of the social media boom?

A report by Vice Media, which can hardly be considered right of center, found that Twitter appeared to suppress certain accounts of conservative groups, individuals and politicians.

It's called "shadow banning," in which Twitter engages in subtle blocking of conservative accounts on the site's search function. It amounts to making one side of the political debate — mainly, conservatives and libertarians — far less visible in searches than the liberal and progressive side.

The report said: "The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It's a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and it's the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility."

Meanwhile, "Democrats are not being 'shadow banned' in the same way," the report said. "Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter's search."

In other words, once again a progressive-dominated tech-site biases its service towards the left-side of the political spectrum to the detriment of the conservative-libertarian right.

It's not just Twitter, of course. Facebook is having problems now for the same reason: It treats Republicans and conservatives differently than Democrats and leftists on its site.

Of course, conservatives don't have to have Facebook or Twitter accounts. But then, if those two social media define themselves as politically oriented sites, the rules change somewhat.

That may be what Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz was getting at on Wednesday. He was one of a number of well-known mainstream Republicans, including several other members of Congress and even the chair of the Republican National Committee, who had their accounts obscured by Twitter.

Gaetz told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he is pondering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over Twitter's suppression of his account.

"I am contemplating a complaint with the FEC, because if my political opponents have better access to the Twitter platform than I do, that's no different than a private company giving my political opponents access to a billboard or television time or radio time," said Gaetz. "That wouldn't be equal."

"So I believe that Twitter may have illegally donated to the campaigns of my opponents by prejudicing against my content," he added.
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There is more.

Both sites are being hit with this complaint at a time when their stock has taken a steep decline because their sites are getting less traffic which means less ad revenue.  They need to open up their sites to fair treatment of conservatives and serve that half of the country too if they expect to grow their operation.