By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
(The Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project wouldn’t be possible without you. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support pro-gun stories like this.)
Gun owners have never had a level playing field on Twitter or any other social media platform. It was always as if someone was looking over your shoulder – someone always was.
Anyone who has posted support for the Second Amendment on Twitter for any length of time – I’ve had an account since 2013 – has more than a few horror stories about how they were mistreated by the platform’s community standards apparatchiks.
If a Twitter hall monitor determined a tweet violated their nebulous Twitter Rules, punishments could range from a label, which warned readers the tweet contained disputed or misleading information, to limiting the tweet’s visibility, to limiting engagements such as likes, retweets and replies, to temporary or permanent suspensions of the offending account. To be clear, these were just the public punishments – punishments that the user was told about. The secret punishments were much more troublesome, such as shadow-banning conservative voices and deleting their followers without notice. I hope Elon Musk makes public the nefarious algorithms and biased practices that have punished and bedeviled conservative Twitter users since the site began.
Why put up with Twitter’s obvious anti-conservative bias? Because, as Musk himself just tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
In other words, if you value your message, Twitter is a good vehicle to get your message heard.
Info is ammo
If I had a dollar for every time someone said we need a conservative-friendly platform similar to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, I’d have enough to buy a really good bottle of bourbon. It’s certainly not easy to create a new social media platform, as we have seen with President Donald Trump’s new site, Truth Social, and the growing pains it is experiencing. There are thousands of folks still waiting for access in Truth Social’s online queue, and those who have made it onto the platform complain there is limited engagement – in other words, there’s no one to talk to.
The one thing Twitter and Facebook have now, which a new site will always struggle to achieve, is that they are platforms in common usage, not unlike an AR – everybody’s got one. Twitter definitely has its share of problems, which we hope Musk will fix, but nearly everyone has the app on their phone or laptop. Common usage is extremely important, especially now, because we need the numbers.
The Biden-Harris administration’s war on our guns uses secrecy as a weapon – private White House meetings held in backrooms without transcripts or public notice, where unelected officials plot how to infringe upon our Second Amendment rights. Only by publicly exposing these secret gatherings can these secret gatherings be stopped.
Information has become ammunition in Joe Biden’s war on our guns. This is why the gun-banners and the rest of the left are so violently and vehemently opposed to Musk’s purchase. They have relied upon Twitter’s censorship of conservative thoughts and ideas for years. Now, once the censorship is removed as Musk has promised to do, they cannot fathom a society where speech is actually free and not something they can rigidly control.
Twitter has long been the province of the mainstream journalist. Many – especially the blue checkmarks at CNN – use it as a reporting tool. The legacy media’s stranglehold on free speech is now ending too, thanks to Mr. Musk, and they’re pushing back hard, especially on liberal networks like CNN, NBC and MSLSD. If the Lemons, Maddows and Reids of the world are united in opposition to anything, it must be a boon for those who value personal freedoms and individual liberties such as free speech, right?
For now, at least until Musk proves me wrong, I will continue to rely upon Twitter as an information source and to post my stories. You can find them here.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project wouldn’t be possible without you. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support pro-gun stories like this.
