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: Yep. They're all doing it. Welcome to the new "Ministry of Truth". There's so many examples out there of the double standards these social media giants employ that one could write a book on it! See also:
Social Media bias: Twitter bans Alt-Right troll for criticizing CNN while ignoring graphic death threats against Assange
Protecting the official narrative: YouTube removing independent media coverage of Las Vegas shooting
Google escalating censorship of left-wing web sites and journalists
Facebook has become 'giant arm of US intel'