Less than a week after a House committee questioned social media companies about censorship on their platforms, reports surfaced Wednesday that Twitter was “shadow banning” prominent Republicans.
The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican members had pressed executives with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube about whether they had taken internal steps to marginalize conservative voices on their platforms. Minority Democratic members had responded in part by insisting such fears were a conservative fairy tale.
On Wednesday, however, Vice reported that search results on Twitter “shadow banned” GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel, Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman, and “several conservative Republican congressmen,” including some who had questioned Nick Pickles, a senior strategist for Twitter, on July 17.
The shift “diminishes their reach on the platform — and it’s the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility,” according to Vice.
Twitter is doing so by omitting those conservative figures from its auto-populated drop-down search, the tool most users employ when looking for content. Twitter has not completely scrubbed the conservatives in question, merely taken them out of the most circulated streams.
The social media giant is not taking the same proactive steps to diminish the visibility of Tom Perez, Ms. McDaniel’s counterpart at the DNC, or prominent Congressional liberals such as Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and Joe Kennedy III, among others, Vice reported.
The House Judiciary Committee could not be reached immediately for comment....
In a statement to Vice News, Ms. McDaniel said, “the notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American. Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on.”