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February 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Twitter continues to evolve its ostensible war on “harmful disinformation” with the development of new tools to warn users about the veracity of the tweets they see, but the latest is only reinforcing long-standing grievances against the social network’s political biases.
This week, NBC News revealed that it has obtained a leaked copy of a demonstration of new features Twitter is developing, including a Wikipedia-style “Community Notes” feature that allows users themselves to rate a tweet as “likely” or “unlikely” to be “harmfully misleading.” Actively providing such feedback could earn users “points” for “contribut(ing) in good faith and act(ing) like a good neighbor” by “provid(ing) critical context to help people understand information they see.”
Another part of the demon displays a large orange box below tweets that have been deemed “harmfully misleading,” followed by corrections from journalists and fact-checkers that have been “verified” by Twitter.
“We're exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to NBC. “Misinformation is a critical issue and we will be testing many different ways to address it.”
The new features do not currently have a launch date.
A screenshot of the latter feature shows how claims by politicians on both sides could be “fact-checked”: a claim about gun sales by Vermont Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and a tweet in which Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shares a report by The Federalist about controversial changes to the process for filing whistleblower complaints (such as the one that launched the failed impeachment of President Donald Trump):
The leaked demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that have been deemed “harmfully misleading,” in nearly the same size as the tweet itself and prominently displayed directly below the tweet that contains the harmful misinformation.https://t.co/TciYv430l6 pic.twitter.com/xafDO29e8M
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 20, 2020
On Friday, Federalist publisher Ben Domenech responded to the report, noting that a Twitter spokesperson “refused to provide any answers” about “who the individuals are at Twitter responsible for falsely characterizing The Federalist’s accurate story as ‘harmfully misleading,’ and why they chose to falsely attack The Federalist in their ‘demo’ of the proposed feature.”
“Twitter and (Twitter CEO) Jack Dorsey have given us plenty of evidence that they cannot be trusted when it comes to bias, shadowbanning, or the company’s ideological censorship of political content,” he said. “Their latest gambit to suppress news stories Twitter dislikes was clearly designed to silence views that conflict with Twitter’s preferred narratives – and in that case will inevitably disproportionately hit accounts and publishers who dare to espouse conservative beliefs.”
“If Twitter is going to acknowledge the fact that they are a political publisher, actively promoting certain stories and censoring the news and opinions of those with whom the company’s executives disagree politically, then the special federal liability carve-outs they have long enjoyed will not survive,” Domenech predicted.
There is substantial evidence of Twitter’s left-wing bias, from its policy that referring to someone by his actual sex rather than his “gender identity” is automatically “hateful” and long record of bans and suspensions affecting non-violent, non-hateful, non-obscene tweets from right-of-center perspectives; to its double standards on violent rhetoric and the admissions of Twitter insiders that the company has intentionally singled out conservative accounts and topics.