The Twitter bias hearings point to favoritism, but not for liberals

House Republicans kicked off their promised oversight offensive on Wednesday with a hearing meant to reveal a conspiracy involving the Biden Administration and Twitter. It did not go well for proponents of the claim that social media companies systematically censor conservatives. 

If anything, the hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability demonstrated that purveyors of the unfounded assertion of anti-conservative bias have it exactly backward: Mounting evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, suggests that Twitter and other major social media platforms have bent and broken their rules to favor followers of former President Donald Trump — and Trump himself. 

Led by Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Wednesday’s session bore the unsubtle title, “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story.” 

Republicans’ goal was to rehash Twitter’s decision shortly before the 2020 election to temporarily restrict the distribution of a New York Post article about the doings in Ukraine of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. While the Post’s account was unverified, Twitter for years has conceded that it was a mistake to limit the post under its since-changed “hacked material” policy.  

At Wednesday’s hearing, Comer said the episode reflected a broader trend: “Twitter aggressively suppressed conservative elected officials, journalists and activists,” he asserted.

But the witnesses, executives at Twitter before Elon Musk took over the company last year, convincingly denied Republicans’ accusation that restriction of the Post article came in response to direct pressure from the Biden presidential campaign and the supposedly anti-Trump Federal Bureau of Investigation. The executives testified that Twitter’s decision in part reflected general FBI warnings about Russian disinformation. But the company’s former deputy general counsel, James Baker testified, “I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation.”

Jordan wasn’t persuaded. “I think you guys got played,” he said. “I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the FBI.”

The problem with Jordan’s opinion is that it didn’t fit with the other evidence the witnesses provided. Former Twitter executive Anika Collier Navaroli testified that the company repeatedly bent and changed its rules to accommodate Trump and his supporters. 

Navaroli recounted that in 2019, Trump tweeted that a quartet of liberal congresswomen nicknamed “the Squad” should “go and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” This violated a Twitter policy forbidding the denigration of immigrants and the use of the phrase “go back to where you came from.” But Navaroli said that when she pointed out the violation, a more senior Twitter executive dismissed the objection. The company then changed its policy to end the ban on “go back to where you came from.”  

“So much for bias against the right wing on Twitter,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., NY), a committee member and the most prominent of the four left-leaning congresswomen targeted by Trump on the platform.

In the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, Navaroli testified, she and other Twitter employees warned that then-President Trump’s tweets could lead to violence. But Twitter management declined to act, she said. Her team drafted a policy that would have removed “coded incitement to violence,” Navaroli said, but higher-ups refused to embrace it. Twitter did remove Trump’s account but only after the violence on Jan. 6, when he continued to make incendiary remarks on Twitter and other social media platforms.

While Comer, Jordan and other Republicans weren’t letting the facts get in the way of their ritual scapegoating of Twitter, the reality that social media favoritism actually tilts in their direction should not be a revelation. As I’ve noted before, the conservative gospel that they are “canceled” by social media companies has always seemed dubious. Conservative pundits and politicians, including Jordan, are highly prolific online and enjoy impressive levels of user engagement. 

In February 2021, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published a paper I wrote that observed the absence of any trustworthy studies finding that platforms were removing conservative content for ideological reasons. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and the University of Exeter last month updated an earlier working paper taking an empirical look at the bias claim.

Twitter, they found, does tend to suspend Republican users far more frequently than Democrats. Analysis of the data reveals, however, “that the tendency for conservative users to be suspended at higher rates than liberal users can be largely explained by conservative users sharing more links to low-quality news sites,” the researchers wrote. In other words, conservatives run afoul of platform rules because they tend to spread more misinformation. 

Researchers at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media tracked the meanderings of benign bots they created and unleashed on Twitter, finding that the platform has a pro-conservative bias. Explaining these results, Filippo Menczer, professor of informatics and computer science and head of the observatory, wrote last May: “Liberal accounts were exposed to moderate content, which shifted their experience toward the political center, while the interactions of right-leaning accounts were skewed toward posting conservative content.” 

Twitter itself has addressed the bias claim and concluded that conservatives fare better on the platform. An in-house study released in 2021 examined politicians’ accounts in seven countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Twitter researchers found that “in six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right received more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group.” In addition, the Twitter team found that “right-leaning news outlets, as defined by the independent organizations … see greater algorithmic amplification on Twitter compared to left-leaning news outlets.” 

Don’t hold your breath for Republicans to relent in their branding of social media as hostile to their interests. But keep in mind the paucity of evidence backing this claim.  

Paul M. Barrett is the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he writes about the effects of the social media industry on democracy.