Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he’s looking to possibly take legal action against Twitter after reports surfaced indicating the company is censoring conservatives.
“I don’t know what Twitter is up to. It sure looks to me like they are censoring people and they ought to stop it. And we’re looking at any legal remedies that we can go through,” Nunes said Sunday.
Nunes, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman, added that he was receiving complaints that people were unable to find him on Twitter — suggesting he had been shadow banned.
Shadow banning is hiding content or accounts without outright deleting them through the use of special algorithms that make the content or accounts effectively harder to search for.
“I had no idea what shadow banning even was. For several months, people have been contacting me saying that, ‘Hey I tried to find you on Twitter, I couldn’t find your account. Why is that?'” Nunes said.
He pointed to a recent Vice News article, without naming it, that showed how four Republicans were effectively shadow banned, while Democrats were unaffected.
The four House Republicans affected were members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus: Nunes, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina. (RELATED: Twitter Shares Drop 19 Percent)
“They don’t call it shadow banning but, effectively, we were getting caught up in some type of trap to where people couldn’t see our Twitter feed,” he added.
Twitter denied censoring conservatives in a blog post on July 26, after President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter that he too will look into taking any possible legal action against the company.
“Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints,” the president wrote.
Twitter, while denying they shadow ban, admitted to using the algorithms and even that “you may have to do more work to find” people on the platform.
“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,” the company wrote.
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