On November 13. a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing was held where they had the presence of Twitter public policy manager Kevin Kane. During the hearing, Rep. Jim Banks commented on his concern about the fact that the social network has made, according to his words, “little progress” in protecting veterans from scams.
At the same time, he took the opportunity to criticize that Twitter has placed more effort into political censorship, saying that it is ironic that they cannot detect illegal acts within their platform, but it is easy for them to remove political messages.
“Isn’t it quite ironic that Twitter can argue in good faith that their Section 230 protections can be retained because it does not have the resources or ability to root out illicit material such as scams targeting veterans on its platform, when the same platform devotes considerable resources and attention to stomping out lawful political speech?”
Given these statements, the company spokesman flatly denied that no efforts are being made to end scams on Twitter.
Kane said that just in 2019 alone they have detected and closed 335,000 accounts of scammers of all kind – not only those that are aimed at veterans.
Kane subsequently denied any type of censorship on Twitter. “Twitter was born to serve the entire public conversation” were his words to describe the vision of the social network, of which he feels great pride.
Somewhat empty words
Although, the words he gave of “accepting diversity and all points of view” do not seem to be supported by their actions. A recent study showed that Twitter applies its terms of service arbitrarily.
According to the results obtained by researcher Richard Hanania of Columbia University, between 2015 and 2019, the monthly suspension of accounts of important political accounts increased nine-fold.
Also, the report indicates that there is a certain tendency that shows that conservative and Republican politicians are approximately four times more likely to be censored and lose their accounts than liberals.
