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September 17, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Twitter is so liberal that conservative employees don’t feel safe expressing their opinions within the organization, the social media platform’s CEO admitted.

“We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well,” Jack Dorsey said, “and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company.”

“They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company,” he said, “and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”

In an interview with tech news website Recode.net, Dorsey explained his acknowledgement of the leftward employee bias at Twitter.

“I think it’s more and more important to at least clarify what our own bias leans towards, and just express it,” he said. “I’d rather know what someone biases to rather than try to interpret through their actions.”

Dorsey’s comments come amid ongoing charges that social media and other big tech companies are liberally biased and work to suppress conservative voices, including prejudice against the pro-life movement and President Donald Trump. The censorship allegations against social media and tech giants coincide with charges the companies also collect data on users and manipulate them with their services.

Dorsey admitted to CNN in August that Twitter’s staff leaned mostly liberal, but he insisted that leftward ideology did not drive the company’s actions.

“We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is … is more left-leaning,” he stated. “But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? And we are not. Period.”

A Project Veritas (PV) report in January found that Twitter had been using “shadow banning” to silence conservatives or Trump supporters.    

Shadow banning is a mode of blocking users from a social media platform without informing them.

In the case of Twitter, tweets from a shadow-banned user will still appear to their followers, but they don’t show up in search results, or anywhere else on Twitter. The individual continues posting but no one sees their content, so they assume no one is engaging with their content, when it’s a case of no one is seeing it.

Twitter was accused in July of “shadow-banning” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Donald Trump Jr. spokesman Andrew Surabian, and several conservative members of Congress.

In April, statistics indicated that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was the likely object of “Twitter’s shadow banning.”

Cruz, with 3 million Twitter followers, was getting only a few hundred retweets, according to an American Thinker piece, while left-wing senator Kamala Harris, with half the number of Cruz’s followers, was getting thousands and thousands of retweets.

Twitter has denied it shadow bans conservative, Christian and pro-life users, but conservatives remain skeptical of its claims.

Twitter censorship of conservatives can take the form of suspending an account or demands that content be removed for violating certain standards. At times, the policy criteria appear dubious and the slant is also against conservatives.

Earlier this year, right-wing commentator Mark Dice reported his Twitter account had been suspended after he implied that transgenderism is a mental illness.

Late last month, Twitter temporarily permitted a tweet suggesting conservative commentator Dana Loesch’s children should be murdered, originally claiming it did not violate the company’s rules, later backtracking on its decision after receiving criticism.

Last year, Twitter blocked Live Action’s pro-life ads, deeming them “inflammatory” and “offensive.”

Twitter told Live Action that it must delete all of its tweets calling for the end of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, all of its tweets on its undercover investigations into Planned Parenthood, and any ultrasound images of preborn children.

Twitter, YouTube and Facebook use software algorithms to determine which content users will see. Since humans write software algorithms, they are subject to bias as well, and the algorithms have also been the focus of suspicions of social media companies’ liberal bias.

Twitter had at first stood alone last month among other social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple and Spotify –  not joining their collective blocking of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Twitter had banned Jones for a week August for violating its platform rules before then permanently banned Jones in early September for “abusive behavior.” Twitter’s ban came after Jones posted a video on September 5 with him shouting at CNN journalist Oliver Darcy during the recent congressional hearings about social media.

Bloomberg reported last week that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is looking into a possible investigation of social media firms. Sessions will be briefed September 25 by Republican state attorneys general who are examining whether Google, Facebook and Twitter are violating consumer-protection or antitrust laws. 

Recently released internal emails showed Google executives tried to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton. Leaked video footage made shortly after the election also showed “panic and dismay” among Google’s leadership at the Trump win, Breitbart reported, along with determination to oppose Trump’s presidency. 

In July, Dorsey expressed regret on social media for having eaten at Chick-fil-A because of the restaurant chain’s “background” of Christian support of marriage.

In April on his own Twitter account, he called an opinion piece concerning driving Republicans from public life a “great read.”

Dorsey has been working to defend Twitter and gather feedback on the social media platform of late, according to the Recode report.

He called in to Sean Hannity’s radio program last month to address charges of censorship and shadow banning, stating, “We do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content. Period.”

Dorsey also had secret meetings with conservative politicians in Washington this summer, the Washington Post reported, to “build ‘trust’ among conservatives who have long chastised the company.”