Is Twitter Really Censoring Free Speech?

The Twitter logo. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

By Kalev Leetaru. January 12, 2018 Forbes

The past month has seen a flurry of high profile announcements chronicling just how all-powerful social media
companies have become in their control over what we see online. From Twitter’s nonchalant reminder of its
ability to ban world leaders and their posts, to Facebook’s actual deletion of a head of state, Silicon Valley has
been on the move to remind the world that it and it alone decides what we are permitted to see in its walled
gardens that define our modern web. As we take stock of a new year, what does 2017 teach us about what to
expect in the coming year?
The power of social media companies to determine what crosses their digital borders has been in the
headlines this week with two major stories: Facebook’s redesigned News Feed that deemphasizes commercial
and news content in favor of friends and family and a set of undercover videos by Project Veritas that claim to
show several Twitter employees openly discussing how the platform limits or deletes posts or entire user
accounts.
Project Veritas is known for selectively editing its videos and the manner in which the most recent
videos were filmed and edited makes it difficult to fully assess their contents and the veracity of the claims they
appear to make. The broader question, however, is why such films received the attention they did in 2018. The
short answer is that they address a topic that the social media platforms themselves have been immensely
reluctant to discuss publicly: how they make the myriad decisions each day of who and what to delete or restrict
on their platforms.
When asked for comment on several specific claims made in the videos, a Twitter spokesperson issued a
statement saying, “The individuals depicted in this video were speaking in a personal capacity and do not
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represent or speak for Twitter” and that “Twitter is committed to enforcing our rules without bias and
empowering every voice on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.” However, when asked about
the specific claims made in the video regarding content moderation, Twitter would provide comment only
regarding “shadowbanning,” saying “Twitter does not shadowban accounts. We do take actions to downrank
accounts that are abusive, and mark them accordingly so people can still to click through and see these Tweets
if they so choose” and referred to its Help Center regarding “Limiting Tweet visibility."
When asked whether the company unilaterally denied the allegations of “unwritten rules” and political
bias in its content review teams that determine what content is considered a violation of its rules, the company
responded to several other questions, but did not issue a denial or any other comment regarding the bias
statements beyond denying the existence of “shadowbanning,” nor provide further comment regarding the
question of bias or reviewer composition. Unfortunately, this appears to be the standard practice today of
Silicon Valley companies when confronted with questions of how they decide what is permissible speech
online: simply remain silent and wait for the story to pass, rather than take the opportunity to provide their users
with more detail about how the online world they call home works.
In particular, when confronted with questions of bias, whether relating to political affiliation in the US
or government pressure internationally, companies have remained largely silent, refusing to provide any
significant detail as to their moderation policies. Why is it that in 2018 the platforms we use to communicate
with each other operate as opaque black boxes into which we have absolutely no insight or voice and simply
accept that a handful of people in Silicon Valley will decide what a third of the earth’s population have the right
to talk about?
When asked whether Twitter would consider releasing its full set of guides, manuals, documentation,
tutorials, training materials and all other materials given to its reviewers or a justification for why it believes
this material cannot be released, the company did not respond. In the past companies have claimed that
releasing such material would enable bad actors to know just what they can get away with, but such arguments
hold little merit in that every day bad actors post material looking to see just how close to the line they can tread
without consequence.
Setting aside the specifics of its training manuals, it is also noteworthy that the companies have similarly
steadfastly refused to provide aggregate demographics regarding their content review staff. Releasing basic top-
level statistics as to gender, race, languages spoken, countries they hail from, self-identified political, social,
religious and other affiliations and other demographics would go a long way towards refuting the bias claims
that regularly surface regarding the companies’ review staff.
Understanding the composition of the review staff used by major social media platforms would help
shed light on the languages and cultures that might be underrepresented and the kinds of hidden biases that can
lurk unnoticed. After all, as I showed in 2016, Facebook’s News Feed was indeed extraordinarily biased, but in
a way that others weren’t talking about: geographically.
Twitter also declined to respond when asked whether the company would be open to convening an
external panel of academics and other experts from outside the company, providing them a large dataset of
tweets and accounts it has limited, deleted or otherwise taken action on, and allowing them to produce a
summary report for public distribution that would assess Twitter's accuracy and biases. In the end, even if the
company felt that releasing any information regarding the aggregate demographics of its reviewers or any detail
of its review process would harm its operational security, it is unclear why the company will not commit to
allowing an independent external panel to assess its work. After all, if a blue-ribbon panel of top scholars and
data scientists from across the world were granted unrestricted access to its review materials and the actual
records of what it has and has not taken action on to analyze them, it would go a long ways towards either
confirming or finally refuting once and for all the myriad questions of bias that naturally occur when companies
operate in strict secrecy.
Even simple questions like the percent of Twitter's accounts that are bots and how much of its content is
automatically generated are complete unknowns. External groups routinely provide their own assessments, but
beyond vague statements, the company has to date declined to provide firm hard numbers on just how much of
its content and viewership is made of carbon rather than silicon. When asked whether the company would
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permit external auditing of its numbers, a spokesperson said they had nothing to add beyond the company’s
previous statements.
Twitter’s opaque moderation policies also make it more difficult for the company to fight “fake news”
and misinformation campaigns that leverage the anonymity of their platform. Parody accounts look and act very
similar to the real accounts they satirize, but if they look too close to the real thing and aren’t clear enough
about their satirical role, it can be difficult for users to tell the difference. For example, in the leadup to last
year’s election, the Russian government is believed to have operated a troll account designed to look like the
Tennessee State GOP. The Twitter account used the State Seal as its logo, “@TEN_GOP” as its handle and
“Tennessee GOP” as its title, with its bio saying, “I love God, I Love my Country.” Only later did it change its
bio to “Unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republications,” which could still easily leave unsuspecting users
thinking it was operated in some fashion by or with the knowledge of the state GOP.
Despite 11 months of the real Tennessee GOP formally complaining to Twitter about the impersonating
account, the company took no action, removing the account only after the company faced substantial scrutiny
for the role its platform played in Russian influence campaigns. When asked for comment a spokesperson
referred to its impersonation policy, which requires that such accounts “clearly stat[e] it is not affiliated with or
connected to any similarly-named individuals.” In this case, the @TEN_GOP account did not include such
language and in fact could easily have been confused for the real account, but Twitter did not respond to a
further request for comment, including the use of the Tennessee State Seal as the account’s avatar.
This of course played out again last year with the rise of the “rogue” US Government agency accounts,
from NASA to the National Park Service. As the accounts began attacking each other and even launching
fundraisers, there was little for the average person to be able to know just which accounts, if any, were actually
run by current or former US Government employees from the agencies they claimed to support.
Moreover, this lack of transparency can have very real consequences. When the official Twitter account
of the President of the United States was briefly deactivated last fall, Twitter released precious little detail about
how a single contractor could allegedly shut down the Twitter account of a head of state. In response, a Twitter
spokesperson offered by email only “We won't have a comment on a former employee. We have taken a
number of steps to keep an incident like this from happening again. In order to protect our internal security
measures we don't have further details to share at this time.” Yet, once again we are left in the dark as to how
much has really changed.
It is a remarkable turn of events that the company that once congratulated itself as “the free speech wing
of the free speech party and famously informed Congress it would not stop alleged terrorists from leveraging its
services has evolved to slowly and steadily distance itself from its free speech ethos. With each update of its
terms of service, the company has moved a bit further towards prioritizing commercial reality over the
anything-goes mentality upon which it was founded.
However, the ideal of unfettered free speech still factors prominently into the company’s public ethos. In
an interview last year, the company’s Head of Global Public Policy Communications offered “I am passionate
about protecting and empowering all people to freely express themselves, even when that can lead to
challenging conversations, because ultimately it is only through connecting with others that we can learn, grow,
and evolve. Twitter has revolutionized the way people communicate and learn from one another, and I am
proud to represent a company that both has such a strong commitment to free speech and approaches this issue
with such care and thoughtfulness.”
Putting this all together, is Twitter actively censoring certain political views or are Project Veritas’
videos the result of selective editing and employee bravado? We will simply never know. Yet, the fact that we
will never know is the problem. Whether it is claims of conservatives being censored on Twitter, allegations of
government influence on Facebook, or very real geographic biases, the platforms we communicate through are
no longer neutral. Here in the United States, your cellular provider doesn’t actively monitor your phone calls
and mute out the topics they don’t like. The USPS doesn’t inspect every letter for adverse political views. Your
ISP doesn’t block access to sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. In other countries such censorship is a
routine and accepted part of daily life, but here in the US we have grown accustomed to neutral
communications mediums that connect us to others without actively moderating what we are permitted to say.
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In their place, the online world that was supposed to bring us together and tear down the last bastions of
censorship has instead created the greatest censorship and surveillance infrastructure the world could ever
imagine.

Kalev Leetaru. I write about the broad intersection of data and society. Senior Fellow, George
Washington University, Past Yahoo! Fellow Georgetown University, Google Developer Expert,
Foreign Policy Top 100 of 2013

Write a Response Essay about this article on censorship by Twitter. This means you must comprehend what the author,
Kalev Leetaru is suggesting; you must identify his main idea and infer what his conclusions are in your analysis. Finally,
you must state what you think about the article. “Your reader (your instructor) is familiar with the article, and is
interested in discerning how deeply you have thought about the concepts, values, belief systems and attitudes that exist
at the heart of the work. A response paper is a heartfelt letter to the author, a conversation, a dialogue with the work, a
great idea, the man, the woman behind the artifact. It is a personal statement of one's epistemology, even of one's own
spiritual experience. It is relaxed, clear, uncensored.” From: What A Response Paper Is and Is Not.
1. What (meanings, values, etc.) was the author trying to promote?
2. Who is Kalev Leetaru? * Is he a stakeholder in this issue? Why? Why not? Look up any items in boldface to learn
context (the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be
fully understood and assessed).
3. What is my personal position relative to the author's? Did you learn about this issue of “shadowbanning” for
the first time reading this article? Had you heard of Project Veritas?
4. How has reading and reflecting on this affected my lived world experience?
5. Do you agree that censorship from Social Media platforms like Twitter have gone too far? Have we lost Freedom
of Speech?
6. Your work must be in MLA format meaning it must be double-spaced, and a 12 pts Times Roman font. There is
no set page length for this exercise. You must include your name, instructor name, and the date spelled out: Ex.
June 7, 2015.

Response Essay 3A CM 4