“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Everybody knows Twitter has it in for President Donald Trump, but the tech giant just announced it’s going all out to rig the 2020 election against its most famous user.
A sneaky new policy would make sure that the president’s tweets would never be seen by most of his followers—even if they agree with him.
Worse yet, Twitter is justifying its censorship policy in the name of improving political dialogue!
In a blog post late last week, Twitter unveiled its plot to stop the president from counter-punching against his political rivals.
If Twitter decides a tweet is “abusive”—and they’re the only ones who know for sure what they mean by that—then they’ll hide the message from most of its users.
Donald Trump is often accused of abusive Twitter behavior because he uses the platform to bypass the corrupt Fake News media, where more than 90% of coverage of the Trump administration is negative.
Sometimes he gets a little hot under the collar about that, and you really can’t blame him.
But Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s latte-sipping liberal friends tell him he has to squeeze the president off Twitter, or else Trump will be re-elected—so suddenly Twitter has moved the goalposts.
Now, it’s blocking access to tweets and making sure that new followers never see what the president has to say—unless they think it will sink his chances in 2020.
A tweet marked for censorship by Twitter personnel would still appear on the person’s timeline—but under a message that says, “The Twitter rules about abusive behavior apply to this Tweet. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain available.”
People who tapped the screen would be allowed to view it—but Twitter would still make sure that it wouldn’t show up in Top Tweets, recommended Tweet notifications, live event pages that it tags, or any search marked “safe search.”
Twitter would treat messages it doesn’t agree with like pornography.
The new rules make sure that, no matter how many people like the tweet, it will never break out beyond the limited number of people who already follow Trump.
And since it would be barred from “safe search,” it wouldn’t be available in any public place that barred “indecent” communications—like many schools and libraries.
What’s more, Twitter doesn’t even hide that it’s doing this to hurt Donald Trump.
Twitter wrote on its blog that, for this new expression-squashing policy to apply to someone, that person would have to:
- Be or represent a government official, be running for public office, or be considered for a government position (i.e., next in line, awaiting confirmation, named a successor to an appointed position);
- Have more than 100,000 followers; and
- Be verified.
Guess who fits all three of those criteria? That’s right, @realdonaldtrump.
But Twitter said it would keep some of Trump’s tweets up…if “preserving a Tweet will allow others to hold the government official… accountable for their statements.”
If it hurts Trump, it stays. If it hurts Democrats, it goes straight down the memory hole.
Even the left-wing website Politico admits Twitter’s new algorithm “appears aimed at President Donald Trump’s often incendiary attacks.”
Twitter has taken aim at Trump in the past. It purged 300,000 of his followers last summer and reportedly made it much harder to find or follow him.
Twitter let things go or a few months, but then on May 1, Trump lost more than 1,000 Twitter followers in one hour.
That came just a week after Trump told Dorsey to stop silencing or shadow banning conservative users, including members of Congress.
He raised the possibility of regulating Twitter if it keeps putting its thumb on the political scales.
“No wonder Congress wants to get involved – and they should,” Trump said at the time.
Just this week, President Trump told Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked President Trump if he could win next year with the Big Tech giants against him.
The president said 2020 would be no different than 2016 when all of Silicon Valley lined up with Hillary Clinton. “Facebook was against me. They were all against me. Twitter was against me,” he said.
“Yet I won,” Trump reminded them, “and I’ll win again.”
And he again said he would bring the hammer down on Twitter if it didn’t stop trying to rig the elections in favor of the Left.
“There are a lot of people that want us to take action against Facebook and against Twitter and frankly, against Amazon,” Trump said.
Carlson, who has promoted taxing and regulating social media companies for months, asked the president if—or when—he was going to pull the trigger.
“I can’t say that, Tucker,” President Trump told him. “That I can’t say.”
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”