I could not believe my eyes and my ears! Earlier this morning, I decided to watch a video of Facebook, Google and Twitter executives testifying before the Senate Judiciary Hearings about Russia's so called meddling in the US elections last year. I knew this whole thing was nothing but a dog and pony show from the outset; any hearing that focuses on a $100,000 ad buy as a mortal threat to our Democracy while disregarding the
billions in dark money that is spent by corporations and non-citizens alike is a farce meant to distract more than it is meant to edify the public.However, I was drawn to this hearing for one reason and one reason only.
Twitter admitted that they actively engage in corporate censorship. In a written testimony, Twitter's general counsel Sean Edgett submitted that Twitter hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails. In a particularly breathtaking admission of Twitter silencing free speech, Edgett noted:
Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. 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.
Allow me to translate this legalistic prattle. What Edgett conceded is that Twitter uses automated flags and algorithms to
prevent various narratives from reaching the broader public. This is 1984 in ways that Orwell could not imagine. Social media sites are the 21st century public square where information is debated and exchanged by society in order to drive our political process. Facebook, Google and Twitter are a lot more than corporations seeking to maximize profits, they are drivers and engineers of public conversations. Instead of being fair arbiters, Twitter and their cohorts are engaging in
stealth censorship where they get to decide what is fit to be reported and what should be repressed as fake news.
Comment: Libyan officials have gone beyond their civil duty in waiting for these militants to be identified. They need to get in gear and find a place in the desert to bury the bodies so their society can move on.