Trump’s Own Company Censors
I just looked. It says it right in the Truth Social terms of service:
“When you create or make available any Contributions, you thereby represent and warrant that:”
“4. Your Contributions are not false, inaccurate, or misleading.”
Isn’t this actually stricter than the standard that Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter enforced? Another broad restriction on users comes in the last word of item #6:
“6. your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.”
I have already analyzed misleading claims that Democrats want the government to censor speech, but I am sorry to admit I have not paid attention to a bunch of stories about Truth Social that are a few years old. Well, this is Slow News, so…
When Truth Social started, it was charged with hypocrisy by John Turley, a defender of free speech and – occasionally – of Truth Social’s founder, Donald Trump. He noted that the Terms of Service tells users that they must not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Oddly enough considering Trump’s cap-lock style on Twitter, the Terms of Service also prohibited “excessive use of capital letters.”
Between 2021 and now, both of those rules have been removed from the terms of service.
Besides its temporary capital letter quota and current language against misleading or “objectionable” material, Truth Social is also known to engage in censorship on a far deeper level than other social media companies. Consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen wrote an extensive report on it in 2022, Truth Can’t Handle the Truth. It tells of shadow bans of: content favoring abortion rights, the January 6 Committee, and even one post insulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The report author herself saw that her own post saying that “abortion is healthcare” disappeared from the site, only to reappear 5 days later after a video about the incident gathered a million views on Tik Tok.
The conservative Washington Examiner also reported in 2022 on far-right critics attacking Truth Social for censorship. In 2023, Newsweek ran an article on people being banned from the platform, allegedly for such offenses as posting a picture of Hunter Biden with a caption that read “Witch Hunt.”
I’ve heard people complain about “Facebook Jail,” but Truth Social also suspends users based on decisions made by computers. It’s included in their FAQ.
Yesterday I came across a 2022 article by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic, which broadens the focus on the right’s hypocrisy over censorship:
“The insistence that social-media companies should not be allowed to make editorial decisions about what is welcome on their platforms … reflects belief in a new constitutional right … the conservative right to post.”
“In Citizens United, the Republican-appointed justices feared that restrictions on corporate electioneering amounted to state control of civic discourse… but … they were thinking of corporations as allies of the conservative movement. The moment that perception changed, conservative views on corporate speech changed too. Last year, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell … warned of state retaliation if private firms did not “stay out of politics,” by which he meant stop opposing Republican interests. It is wrong to “muzzle” the “principal agents of the modern free economy,” unless they do something Republicans don’t like. Then it’s fine.”
“Concisely summarizing the conservative right to post, the right-wing social network ProAmericaOnly promises both “no censorship” and “no liberals.””
It was with all this in mind that I heard today that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg decided that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point” and consequently was removing fact checking from Facebook. The fact that Zuckerberg explicitly mentioned the election in the announcement brings to mind the cartoon showing Zuckerberg and others bowing down before Trump. You know, the cartoon the Washington Post wouldn’t run.
The new Facebook policy is not even aimed at censorship. It is aimed at fact checking, which is the FB practice of putting a warning label and link to information, rather than removing content. I suspect they will still be taking pornography down.
I do not think that free speech concerns about how social media moderates constant are all a right wing conspiracy. And I am not saying that Truth Social should not do any content moderation. All major social media platforms have something they consider too objectionable to post. However, it is worth keeping in mind that when Donald Trump and his minions are pointing at alleged censorship on platforms they consider “too liberal,” he is doing worse on his own.
Oh, I Almost Forgot…
After I posted this I remembered one more point I wanted to make.
I used to go on the foxnews.com comments section and comment on stories. I should have stopped because most commenter’s idea of a debate was calling me a libtard. Unfortunately, that’s not why I stopped. I stopped because my comments started disappearing soon after I posted them. In fact, I am not sure at that point whether anyone was seeing them instead of me.
Now, I do not know if that was censorship. It may have been some kind of glitch. But it crossed my mind that maybe their algorithm or monitors or whatever had caught on that my account kept pointing out the flaws in their articles. It would be interesting to have a few people go on Fox, promote a liberal viewpoint for a few weeks, and see if their stuff starts disappearing too.