by Giulio Meotti
Libertarian magazine Reason compared it to George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth”. To ensure “the safety of users”, or to protect them from incorrect thoughts and words (Islamophobic, homophobic, migrantphobic, transophobic …), Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had seen fit to create an internal consulting group with a disturbing name: “Council for trust and security”. It may take a few years to figure out that it is tasked, as in Orwell’s 1984, with eliminating forbidden words and thoughts, so let’s look at what it has been doing.
The famous American satire site, The Babylon Bee, has just been suspended from Twitter. It had violated “trust and security”. Its director, Seth Dillon, said they were banned for a tweet mocking Rachel Levine, who identifies as a transgender and US public health service officer. “Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine,” reads the tweet.
Dillon said the social media would be restored in 12 hours, but only if the tweet was deleted. “We do not delete anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it,” Dillon replied. “I got some messages from people asking me how they could help. I can think of a few ways,” Dillon said in another tweet.” Never censor yourself. Insist that 2 and 2 equals 4 even if Twitter tries to force you to say otherwise”.
In February, Twitter suspended the account of Vicky Hartzler, a candidate for a US Senate seat in Missouri, for saying that only women should compete in women’s track and field (just won by a man who proclaims himself a woman).
Twitter blocked Spanish congressman and philosopher Francisco José Contreras for saying “men can’t get pregnant”.
Twitter deleted the official Hungarian government account. But also the profile of the Czech cardinal Dominika Duka, a conservative (yes, Twitter banishes conservatives with gusto).
Meghan Murphy, a popular gender politics blogger, was banned from Twitter for writing that transgender women are not the same as men. Twitter told her that in order to regain control of her account, she would have to remove two tweets. Murphy deleted them, but she also replied: “Am I not allowed to say that men are no longer women or ask questions about the notion of transgenderism?” Twitter therefore banned Murphy forever.
“Twitter is like Pravda,” wrote left-wing economist Branko Milanovic. “It is a monopoly. There is nowhere else to go. In the Soviet Union they had to invent ‘samizdat’ (self-publishing) to circumvent the monopoly “.
When Trump was banned, French essayist Alexandre del Valle pointed out that social media so quick to battle with Trump turn more than one blind eye to Islamic regimes.
Islamic preachers are free on social media to say what they want. Take former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who has 4 million followers on Facebook and 1.3 million on Twitter. On Twitter, after Samuel Paty’s beheading, Mahathir wrote that “Muslims have the right to kill millions of French”. The tweet has been removed, but the account is still there.
Like that of the Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov (400,000 on Facebook), who justified the massacre in Charlie Hebdo, or the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei, who on Twitter called for the elimination of Israel.
Among the 200 accounts in the world with the highest number of followers are those of many Islamic preachers, reveals a French research center:
Mohamed al-Arifi (21.4 million followers on Twitter; 25 million on Facebook, first Saudi account, first religious account in the world and 86th in the world) justifies the right to beat his wife; Ayid al-Qarni (19 million Twitter followers) who fights “Western values”; Ahmad Al Shugairi (18 million), who advocates hatred of “unbelievers”; up to the most famous of the Muslim Brotherhood preachers, Youssef Al Qardaoui (642,362 on Facebook), never banned from social media while calling for the killing of apostates and Jews, such as the 4 Israelis murdered in Beersheba.
Hani Ramadan, brother of Tariq, who supports stoning and was expelled from France also chirps freely on Twitter. Just as does Tareq al-Suwaidan, the Islamic preacher banned from Belgium, the United States and Italy.
After this progressive Pravda, they will impose Chinese harmony on us … And no one will even notice that they have been censored anymore.