Op-ed argues new Twitter CEO may increase censorship after Dorsey exit
Vice President of Founders Fund Mike Solana explains why he thinks Twitter is about to censor free speech even more after Jack Dorsey's departure.
Media company Grabien was suspended from Twitter on Friday after posting a quote from a U.S. congressman.
Grabien founder Tom Elliott tweeted Friday that his company, Grabien Media, was suspended from the social media platform for quoting Rep. Andy Biggs's comments regarding COVID-19 treatments.
"Rep. Biggs: Big Pharma Won't Consider Therapeutics Like HCQ or Ivermectin Because of Economic Interests," the offending tweet read, with an attached link to video of Bigg's comments.
The CDC has advised against using ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.
TWITTER TEMPORARILY SUSPENDS MEDIA WATCHDOG OVER CRITICAL VACCINATIONS TWEET
Twitter told Grabien in a message that the account had been suspended for "violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19."
Elliott called the suspension "next-level Twitter absurdity" and compared it to similar questionable suspensions he's experienced in the past.
"Obviously, in this case, quoting an elected leader on an issue that matters to everyone is important and newsworthy, regardless of whether you agree," Elliott wrote. "And I can’t help but add that his basic point was once mainstream among progressives."
He added, "I’ve appealed, making this point. However I have no confidence in Twitter doing the right thing and acknowledging this tweet did not violate its terms & conditions."
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned from his position last month and was replaced by long-time Twitter employee Parag Agrawal.
In a MIT Technology Review interview last year, Agrawal had stated, "One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There's a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention."
He continued, "And so increasingly our role is moving toward how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory."
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