WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Indiana Republican congressman Jim Banks sent a letter that asked Twitter’s newest board member to ensure free speech is protected on the platform.
“Now that you are Twitter’s single largest shareholder, I urge you to advocate for revising Twitter’s content policy to allow all speech that is both lawful and factually accurate,” Rep. Banks wrote to Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday in a letter first obtained by The Daily Caller. The entrepreneur recently took a 9.2 percent stake in the Big Tech company, becoming its largest shareholder.
“This would be a basic but important step towards restoring free expression to a platform that you described as the ‘de facto public town square,’” Banks wrote.
The conservative congressman mentioned his own experience with Twitter censorship – the Big Tech platform locked his account in October 2021 for referring accurately to Biden administration official Richard “Rachel” Levine as a man. It’s also locked the accounts of LifeSiteNews, The Babylon Bee, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, and Tucker Carlson for making similar references to the gender-confused Biden official.
“While this change is simple, it would significantly alter Twitter’s current censorship practices. Twitter has censored an alarming number of true statements,” Banks wrote.
“For example, Twitter suspended me last October 3 for a factually correct tweet about biological sex and most recently suspended critics of NCAA transgender athlete Lia Thomas. Considering Twitter’s content policy has explicitly banned telling the truth, this shouldn’t be surprising,” he wrote.
Banks also wrote about Twitter censoring people who said the COVID vaccine did not spread transmission of COVID, a statement later proven to be a fact.
“In 2021, Twitter changed its terms of service to prohibit all ‘false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus,” he wrote. “Of course, the COVID vaccine does not prevent the transmission of the virus.”
Free speech changes on the platform could help rebuild trust among Twitter’s users, including its conservative ones, Banks wrote.
“What makes Twitter’s censorship especially alarming is the obvious partisan slant,” Rep. Banks wrote. “One 2019 study by a Columbia University researcher found that Twitter suspended conservative users at a ratio of 21-to-1 compared to liberal users.”
“By committing to to tolerating factually true statements, Twitter could greatly improve its public standing,” Banks wrote.
He told Musk his “appreciation for free speech and impressive business success is a glimmer of hope for the future of Big Tech companies like Twitter.”