Donald Trump, Jr. is calling foul on Twitter for what he sees as the social media platform’s censorship of his tweets. In a lengthy Instagram post, which features a screenshot of the alleged censorship, Trump Jr. complains that a recent Obamacare-related tweet of his was hidden from his followers’ timelines and labelled “potentially sensitive content.”
Amazing. The top tweet is on my feed and the bottom one is the same tweet as seen from my wife’s feed 7 minutes later. I don’t think there is anything remotely controversial or offensive about the truth here and yet it seems @twitter decided to at least partially censor the tweet.
He may be on to something. Twitter typically hides and tags as “potentially sensitive” posts that contain profanity or nudity (classic Not Safe For Work content). Like most social media algorithms, no one has any clue what factors go into tagging content as sensitive.
Trump Jr. is right to question Twitter’s motives. They have a long history of being quick to ban right-of-center accounts for violating their terms of service (think Milo), yet slow to take action on liberals who attack conservatives in the most offensive ways possible (too numerous to list).
The tweet in question has to do with Aetna announcing that it is withdrawing from Obamacare exchanges. This is huge news and a testament to the failure of the current healthcare system that was so effusively championed by the left. So of course the liberals at Twitter might want to downplay a critical tweet from a high-profile account like Donald Trump, Jr.’s.
Truly, it may just be an algorithm failure, but Trump’s conclusion may not be all that wide of the mark:
Considering how benign this is compared to some of the other stuff I see on twitter it’s shocking that this could be singled out as somehow offensive, but I guess the failure of #obamacare doesn’t fit the narrative of Silicon Valley.
What do you all think? Was it censorship?
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