Twitter Doubling Down on Censorship, Calls It Free Speech

Gabriela Pariseau
April 26th, 2023 9:28 AM

Text to Speech

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While Twitter is still throttling content, the platform will now notify users when it limits an account’s reach. It was the least the platform could do.

“Freedom of Speech, not reach,” Twitter Safety euphemized in a Monday tweet announcing that the platform rolled out its new visibility filter labels. A Twitter Safety blog post last week explained that the platform would soon “add publicly visible labels to Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we’ve limited their visibility.”

Twitter Safety attempted to justify its “freedom of speech, not reach” stance in its blog post. “Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship,” Twitter Safety wrote. “We also believe it is our responsibility to keep users on our platform safe from content violating our Rules.” 

Twitter Safety attempted to justify its “freedom of speech, not reach” stance in its blog post. “Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship,” Twitter Safety wrote. “We also believe it is our responsibility to keep users on our platform safe from content violating our Rules.” 

While the new policy marks a victory for transparency, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider warned that policing speech is not Twitter's responsibility. “Our skepticism of Twitter becoming a haven for free speech has just been justified,” he said. “It’s not Twitter’s responsibility to limit speech. That should be left up to individual users who can decide what they like and dislike. Censoring or throttling speech is what authoritarians do. It should never take place in a free society.”

“Freedom of speech is more than just the ability to say something. It is the ability to be heard having said something. The notion that limiting reach while not limiting someone’s freedom of speech is nothing short of being a cute and passive aggressive form of censorship. It’s as if Twitter is saying, ‘You can say something, but we’re not going to let anyone hear you,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris.

“As the old adage goes, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Perhaps if no one is there to hear it, we may never know, and that’s precisely the point, isn’t it?”

Twitter attempted to downplay the blatant censorship. “Restricting the reach of Tweets, also known as visibility filtering, is one of the existing enforcement actions that allows us to move beyond the binary ‘leave up versus take down’ approach to content moderation,” Twitter Safety wrote. The platform further touted that the new labels will allow for “more proportional and transparent” enforcement of its rules and that “[tweet] [a]uthors will be able to submit feedback on the label if they think we incorrectly limited their Tweet’s visibility.”

However, all the sugar-coating and wordsmithing doesn’t change the simple truth: “Tweets with these labels will be made less discoverable on the platform,” wrote Twitter Safety. Aka they will be censored. 

The new labels come in conjunction with Twitter’s attempt to reduce the number of suspensions users experience. “Suspensions are now reserved for severe policy violations therefore some are not eligible for reinstatement,” the platform tweeted on April 17. “Most policy violations will result in restricted reach of content instead of suspension. We strive to maintain a very low error rate for account suspension actions.” 

Twitter implemented these changes three weeks after MRC Free Speech America released a damning study pointing out that censorship increased under Musk’s leadership. The study also found that the penalties for violating Twitter’s rules had become harsher and affected smaller accounts. The platform also changed its hateful conduct policy – which previously prohibited misgendering and deadnaming trans-identifying people – after the same study noted that a large section of Musk's Twitter censorship silenced those critical of the transgender ideology.  

Conservatives are under attack. Contact Twitter at (415) 222-9670 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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