When it comes to prosecuting former President Donald Trump and his associates for alleged malfeasance, or any conservative, left-wing politicians and their supporters like to tout the “no one is above the law” line. Yet, when one of their own breaks the law, their collective silence is deafening.
It’s selective justice where lawbreakers on the right are swiftly and harshly held accountable by the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice, but at times, their left-leaning counterparts are either given a pass or treated with kid gloves. One of the latest high-profile examples is former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who lied before Congress while testifying at a 2018 House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting to discuss “Transparency and Accountability” at his social media company.
“I want to read a few quotes about Twitter’s practices, and I just want you to tell me if they’re true or not,” Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., said. “Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?” “No,” Dorsey responded. “Are you censoring people?” Doyle followed. “No,” Dorsey answered again. “Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans … is that true?” Doyle asked. “No,” Dorsey said a third time. Twitter’s then CEO also assured Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., that any shadow-banning of Republican lawmakers by the social media company’s algorithm “was not written with that intention.”
Yet the recent release of documents and internal discussions among Twitter’s top brass and far-left “content moderators” confirm it did shadow-ban and censor conservatives while Dorsey ran the then public company. “A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topicsall in secret, without informing users,” journalist Bari Weiss tweeted last week.
She revealed “Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a ‘Trends Blacklist,’ which prevented his tweets from trending. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino who at one point was slapped with a ‘Search Blacklist.'” Weiss added, “Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to ‘Do Not Amplify.'”
Weiss explained, “What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF.’ Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. ‘Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,’ one senior Twitter employee told us. ‘VF’ refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. All without users’ knowledge.”
That’s the definition of shadow-banning and censorship, which Dorsey’s almighty social media company used to silence political opponents and conservatives from sharing information and opinions his “woke” speech police didn’t like. The underhanded and far-reaching censorship operation also included GOP lawmakers who were shadow banned, former President Donald Trump, who was booted from Twitter under Team Dorsey, and the New York Post, whose factual reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was blocked in October 2020 to help Joe Biden win the election.
Yet despite these bombshell revelations illustrating the liberal tech darling Jack Dorsey made false statements before Congress and likely committed perjury, he’s a free man.
Now contrast that with how Donald Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone was treated by the Justice Department for making false statements before Congress in 2017 during sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Stone was not only charged and convicted for making false statements and subsequently tossed in jail, but his over-the-top arrest was also nothing short of spectacular.
“At the crack of dawn, 29 FBI agents arrived at my home with 17 vehicles, with lights flashing, when they could have contacted my lawyer,” Stone said in January 2019, following his heavy-handed arrest.
Yet today, since the #TwitterFiles have been released by its new owner Elon Musk, not a single Democrat lawmaker has called for Dorsey to be investigated for making false statements before Congress. Nor have we seen any action, so far, by the DOJ to haul the billionaire Twitter co-founder in for questioning.
Tells you everything you need to know about the politicization of the Justice Department today.
Adriana Cohen is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. To find out more about Adriana Cohen and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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