Republican Congressman Devin Nunes Claims Drudge Report Is Being Censored by Twitter
In a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes claimed that Twitter was censoring the Drudge Report’s tweets.
A California Republican, Nunes has previously asked his Twitter followers to retweet if they’d seen “sensitive content” warnings on the Drudge Report’s Twitter feed. By Monday morning, that message received nearly 13,000 retweets.
In his Sunday appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” Nunes again sounded the alarm on Twitter’s censorship of the right-leaning news aggregator.
“I think what the American people need to understand is that there’s bias against conservatives and Republicans all across this country,” Rep. Nunes told Bartiromo.
“And now as you see things — it’s always been there with newspapers and television, but now as you see it getting to the internet,” he continued.
“It’s one of the challenges with (messaging to) millennials,” he added, pointing out how Google listed “Naziism” in an information box regarding the California Republican Party’s ideology.
“So this censorship of conservatives and Republicans and conservative values continues in this country and here in California we’re on the front lines,” Nunes said.
“I just looked on Twitter. Drudge — the Drudge Report is being censored today, so for the last three or four days I haven’t been able to get on the Drudge Report because it’s being censored on Twitter.”
Nunes also connected this bias to California’s economic woes: “I just hope at some point people realize there’s a reason why California’s not doing as well as the rest of the country.”
When asked for comment as to what sort of censorship Nunes was talking about, the congressman’s staff told the Washington Examiner that some Drudge tweets were being blocked due to messages saying they contained “sensitive content.”
While a spokesman for Nunes acknowledged that the messages could be turned off via changing preferences in the “Privacy and Safety” settings, he said it was indicative of the “extra hoop users are required to jump through to access the tweets.”
Twitter did nor respond to Washington Examiner requests for comment.
Subtle forms of censorship have been a consistent worry for conservative watchers of Silicon Valley. A study by the Western Journal, Conservative Tribune’s parent publication, earlier this year noted that conservative news sources were hit significantly harder by Facebook’s algorithm change than liberal sources, a move that’s pretty much statistically inexplicable unless some form of political bias was at play in crafting the algorithm.
Meanwhile, Facebook has apologized for limiting the reach of pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk because its team “came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, publicly apologized to Turning Point USA conservative pundit Candace Owens after Twitter’s news feed described her as being “far-right.”
Far right? Allow me to clarify: I believe the black community can do it without hand-outs. I believe the Democrats have strapped us to our past to prevent us from our futures. And I won’t stop fighting until all black Americans see that.
I’m not far right—I’m free. pic.twitter.com/wtqCuYPtM2— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 21, 2018
Add that to Google’s other recent controversies, and you have a fairly potent stew of conservative distrust against Silicon Valley’s motives when it comes to policing speech on their services.
Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that Nunes’ claims are pretty much unscientific and based on personal experience. While such claims of Twitter “shadow-banning” have popped up not infrequently of late and Twitter has a well-documented internal liberal bias, there’s no specific evidence that the claim Nunes was making involving recent censorship of the Drudge Report was accurate.
Given the explosiveness of Nunes’ claim — in addition to the fact that the Trump investigation has made the House Intelligence Committee chairman one of the most visible Republicans in Washington — we expect to see more on this in the coming days and weeks.
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