Twitter, launched in 2006, is “an online news and social networking site where people communicate in short messages called tweets.” It is called “microblogging.” The messages are limited to 280 characters (originally 140), but they can include photos and videos and links to web sites, social media accounts, etc. Twitter has become the most popular forum for live news and firsthand reports from ongoing events. But over the past few years, Twitter has increasingly acted as a totalitarian censoring agency aimed at restricting the speech of political and religious conservatives. After putting repeated warnings on President Donald Trump’s tweets (including a pro-life video featuring smiling babies in Jan. 2020 and tweets concerning mail-in balloting and racial violence in Minneapolis in May 2020), Twitter infamously banned the president of the United States in January 2021. When the ban occurred, Trump’s Twitter account was in the top ten most popular, with about 70 million followers. In June 2020, Twitter banned comedy writer Graham Linehan for making the outrageous statement that “men aren’t women.” Twitter banned Christian media companies The Babylon Bee and The Christian Post for calling Rachel Levine–a transgender Biden official who serves as the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services–a man. Project Veritas released undercover footage of Twitter employees discussing “shadow-banning,” which secretly reduces the visibility of an individual’s tweets. In Oct. 2020, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf labeled Twitter a threat to America’s security, warning that the tech giant’s quick trigger finger in censoring government agencies could deny people information they need to be safe.
(Friday Church News Notes, November 4, 2022, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)
