The use of social media and its manipulation by political and advertising groups was noted with Trump’s 2016 election victory. After this, a series of lawsuits and legal proceedings began to determine how appropriate it was for sites like Facebook and Twitter to take essentially political advertising through what were many fake accounts. As a result, certain restrictions were passed that limited the type and extent of political advertising.
Many people on the right were angry, and said this was an “attack” on “my president” from “the left”. However, the fact is that while those on the left seem to have received less enforcement, there still has been enforcement and it may indeed be their turn to face the scrutiny of the same corporate regulations. Such was the case when Mike Bloomberg’s campaign had seventy account on Twitter suspended for violating the company’s manipulation policy.
Michael R. Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one.
But one of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.
“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesman said. Some of the suspensions will be permanent, while in other cases account owners will have to verify they have control of their accounts. (source)
The question is, where is the Republican voice talking about ‘freedom of speech’ that they claimed with Trump?
It will not be there, because the issue was never one of principle. What the right complains about the left doing they will also do, and also the other way around. What is good here is that, regardless of the problems with Twitter, the company seems at least to be, on this issue, keeping with something of the original ideas on limiting certain types of political speech, regardless of the party.
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