Twitter has now tried to censor the President of the United States, dropping any pretense of neutrality. On issues of race, Twitter’s neutrality was always a myth anyway.
As the National Legal and Policy Center criticized, Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey embraced Black Lives Matter in 2014 at a time when its activists were cheering on, or rationalizing away, the murder of police officers.
Dorsey even unveiled a #blacklivesmatter wall painting at company headquarters. He was photographed with BLM activist DeRay McKesson, both clenching fists.
Clenched fists are not symbols of neutrality, or even of the weak confronting the strong. Instead, clenched fists are meant to threaten and intimidate.
In 2015, McKesson defended looting as a legitimate form of political protest in a talk at Yale University. McKesson ran for mayor of burned-out Baltimore and got 2.6%, but he was much more popular in Silicon Valley where Twitter Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani contributed to his campaign.
In he wake of the murder of three Baton Rouge policemen in 2016, NLPC Chairman Peter Flaherty asked Dorsey, along with Eric Schmidt of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, to end corporate support for Black Lives Matter. He wrote:
“Billionaires don’t have to worry about their personal security but working people and the poor do…Your support of Black Lives Matter is helping to fray the social fabric in cities all over the country.”
The roots of today’s racial double standards are in the 1980’s when Al Sharpton orchestrated a fake hate crime. Sharpton never acknowledged or apologized for the Tawana Brawley hoax, but is he is nonetheless embraced today by the Silicon Valley firms that bankroll his organization.
Now the death of George Floyd was anything but a hoax. It was captured on video for the world to see. But the same double standards that allowed for Sharpton’s rehabilitation, now allow for looters to be characterized as “protesters.”
The dangerous liaison between Big Tech and the left is bearing ugly fruit now. Twitter and other Silicon Valley firms contribute to the violence through selective enforcement of their standards, promoting a moral relativism that allows for violence, lawlessness and thuggery.