Erratic billionaire Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. His stated goal is to make the platform more friendly to free speech.
“Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law,” he said in an interview yesterday.
When guys like Musk complain about social platforms and free speech, it’s usually because they believe those platforms are being overly restrictive of conservative speech in particular. The former president, for instance, has sued several tech companies alleged censorship, and roughly seven-in-ten conservatives believe social media giants favor liberal views over conservative ones.
The tech companies say that they aren’t targeting conservative viewpoints, but rather misinformation, fake news and hate speech that violates their policies.
Fortunately, we in the media don’t need to shrug our shoulders and “both sides” our way around this discussion. There’s a good deal of empirical evidence on the how and why of who gets banned from social media platforms, and some of the strongest was presented in a new paper that just got posted this month.
The authors, hailing from MIT and Yale, tracked several thousand partisan Twitter users during the months before and after the 2020 election. They found that by the end of the study period, a whopping 36 percent of the Republicans had been suspended from the platform, compared to just 8 percent of the Democrats.
On the surface, this might seem like slam-dunk proof of conservatives’ claims about censorship and viewpoint discrimination. But check out the results of the second half of the study: