I think it's safe to say that they "do" (or did) have a left-wing biased algorithm, supplemented by copious amounts of manual oversight.

The most genuine concern with what Twitter is doing is that they're carrying the water for the federal government, and looking to the federal government for direction on who and what to censor. That would make them effectively a state actor, which would be a violation of the 1st amendment. The fact that the Trump administration was petitioning them is especially concerning, because Trump would have been the acting President. Even if the overall bias was left-wing, it's unacceptable for an administration to use private companies to censor in instances where they otherwise could not.

This post was edited by bogie160 on Dec 4 2022 04:59pm

All actual analysis of how twitter amplifies messages shows a bias towards conservatives.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

I'm very curious about this edited part of your post in particular. Can you expand on this?

The abstract doesn't say "bias", though. It says that right-wing viewpoints are amplified. But doesn't this make sense? Americans are 50% more likely to identify as conservative than liberal. In a case without bias, we'd still expect right-wing sources to be amplified at much higher rates.

They looked at 7 countries not just the US and lol. There's more left leaning people than right in this country. Why do you think republicans have only won the presidential popular vote once since 1990?

So instead of admitting you were wrong, somehow i'm 'simping' for the New York Post and their journalistic integrity is in question.
Releasing a story during a time that is bad for democrats does not indicate a lack of integrity.

Many democrats and 'senior intelligence officials' falsely claimed the true story was Russian disinformation. Do you think that calls their integrity into question?

You don't like that the laptop story made democrats look bad.
You also don't like that exposing political censorship shows that democrats and the former twitter execs were engaged in unethical and unpopular behavior.
So you lash out and grasp for anything you can to undermine the story and those who are sharing it, even if its factually inaccurate and fallacious.

Having preferences and feelings doesn't mean you have integrity, morals or truth on your side.

Twitter execs took unprecedented actions to ban and hide a story that was bad for the Democrats right before an election. Fact. Do you have a problem with this?

No amount of screeching about Trump and mocking Taibbi will change this.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/328367/americans-political-ideology-held-steady-2020.aspx

The Democratic party wins elections by being a big tent party. Moderates make up a dominant share of the electorate. The abstract you posted looked at whether there was a bias against moderate viewpoints, and didn't find one.



Given that conservatives outnumber liberals, shouldn't we expect conservative amplification to be more powerful than liberal amplification? And despite outnumbering moderates, the paper didn't find any conservative benefit relative to moderates. That seems to support my point.

As for the other countries involved, I haven't gone through them methodically, but I expect something similar is going on. With respect to Japan, the LDP is the most popular party, and its amplification reflects that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Japanese_general_election

This post was edited by bogie160 on Dec 4 2022 05:51pm

A private organization acting on behalf of the state is a "state actor", subject to the same restrictions placed on the United States federal government. Case law is relatively strict, so it's not enough for the state to have regulated and funded an institution (e.g. Rendell-Baker v. Kohn), they must be influencing or controlling the operational decisions of the private party. In this case, the federal government (under both Trump and Biden) is soliciting and influencing Twitter's behavior to censor speech that runs contrary to administration goals. The degree of connection between the government and the private party also matters. The fact that James Baker left the FBI (as general counsel) and went to Twitter in a similar role, and is involved in the current story probably does not help the government's case.

Bogie had an interesting response to this, but I'm going to come at it from a different angle.

The study has very limited implications and does not prove twitter is biased towards the right or conservatives.
So much relies on who you follow and interact with (and how frequently other people interact with it, etc) and this doesn't deal with issues like banned accounts or what I will outline below. Much of this type of thing is admitted in the study.

The issue at hand is not about whether Gateway Pundit and (non-banned) official republican politicians have marginally higher 'amplification' than buzzfeed and democrats. (as defined by one flawed and limited study)
What reach did Trump's tweets have after he was banned?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: I ‘fully admit’ our bias is ‘more left-leaning’
~99.7% of 2020 twitter employee donations went to democrats.


Twitter was often banning right wing/republican figures including the sitting president at the time, promoting democrat/left news sources on the sidebar and filtering what else was allowed to trend, shadowbanning, deranking and filtering accounts(sometimes only viewable by followers), banning people based on voicing some views against lefty orthodoxy(ex: Tim Pool vs twitter episode), outright banned links and accounts who shared the Hunter Laptop story, Banned the mere mention of Eric Ciaramella, and inserted biased 'fact checks' primarily under republican and right wing figures' tweets.

It got to the point where several other twitter-like platforms were being set up because so many conservative/right wing figures were banned on twitter.

"If Twitter is doing one team's bidding before an election shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election that is the definition of election interference"
"Frankly Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee, it was absurd"
- Elon Musk

This post was edited by cambovenzi on Dec 4 2022 06:16pm

the people in this thread are sad af. post 10 in the twitter thread said that it was both trump and biden campaigns. idiots forget that trump was president in 2020 while this was happening. a nothing burger. but feel free to waste your lives arguing some more.