Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”
His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.
But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.
“Climate change is real and man-made” is not an emotion-based statement. “Outlawing abortion worsens medical outcomes for pregnant women” is not an emotion-based statement. “Children do better in class when the school system offers free lunches” is not an emotion-based statement. “Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around” is not an emotion-based statement.
Frankly, there are an absolute fuck-ton of things that are simple statements of fact that conservatives delusionally take issue with. Factual reality is not a matter of opinion and I’m not only sick and tired of conservatives trying to make it into one, but perhaps even more sick and tired of ‘enlightened centrists’ carrying water for them!