Guest Editorial by @ChristiJunior
The latest Muslim atrocity, this time striking Brussels, brought about the usual reactions from politicians and the press: Platitudes about needing stand together and oppose extremism, expressions of sympathy and solidarity with the victims, and of course, preemptive warnings about an Anti-Muslim backlash. Serious discussions about WHY the terror threat is growing, and questions about why Europe is importing more and more potential terrorists even as it is dealing with an ever-growing number homegrown terrorists, those were deemed “inappropriate” – despite such discussions being absolutely vital if Europe is to prevent future terrorist atrocities, rather than just shed tears for the latest victims.
If no serious discussion about Terrorism and the costs of Muslim Immigration took place in respectable circles, at least SOME kind of discussion was taking place on Twitter that dealt with the core issue, in the form of #StopIslam, which shortly after the Brussels attacks started Trending worldwide. Understandably so, since the Brussels attacks were just the latest in a long list of Muslim outrages against the Western world, which cover everything from 9/11 and the Paris attacks to the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and the epidemic of rape and sexual assault that Muslims are responsible for in Germany and other European countries. In terms of an Anti-Muslim Backlash, a hashtag limiting itself to bashing the religion, not the believers, is a very mild response indeed.
However, in plenty of Progressive/SJW circles #StopIslam generated a lot of outrage, more outrage in fact than they’d mustered in response to the latest act of Muslim terrorism that had caused the hashtag to go viral. So of course the Twitter crew, good SJWs appeasers that they are, suddenly and completely removed #StopIslam from the list of Trending hashtags. Now clearly, this was not due to lack of activity, given how it outperformed numerous other Trending hashtags of the day despite the hours spent removed from that list, effectively having its visibility dramatically reduced.
#StopIslam is trending. This issue cannot be ignored or shouted down, #RegressiveLeft. Time to be honest. pic.twitter.com/ufA90ZxopD
— Sargon of Akkad (@Sargon_of_Akkad) March 22, 2016
Now, plenty of people noticed this and actually called Twitter out on its obvious censorship, however, what happened afterwards was a lot more interesting, as well as more disturbing.
You see, after a few hours the hashtag returned to the trending list as suddenly as it had disappeared. However, when you clicked on the hashtag this time, the results were completely different in tone from the ones that had previously dominated it – at least when I was checking out the tag just before, and during, its disappearance. Suddenly, the Anti-Islam tweets were gone from the top results, which now were uniformly made up of tweets defending Islam, much of it being outright propaganda and discredited talking points.
This was especially obvious with the Photos tab, which quickly went from being broadly Anti-Islam to being 100% Pro-Muslim. Now, you could argue that this was due to backlash tweets made in response to the tag hours ago (before it was first removed from the Worldwide Trends) gaining in popularity and finally showing up en masse, but once I checked the Photos closer one of the first results I got was a photo belonging to a tweet with almost no interest in it whatsoever:
1 Like, 1 Retweet, yet promoted by Twitter as one of Top #StopIslam Photos – no agenda-pushing here, no siree! pic.twitter.com/m2Gazmh8A2
— Christi Junior (@ChristiJunior) March 22, 2016
Keep in mind, it is not unprecedented for Twitter to do this – I’ve seen this happen to #GamerGate too, with Anti-GamerGate tweets boasting almost no activity being Promoted, ESPECIALLY in the Photo section, despite multiple new Pro-GG posts with photos getting 100+ retweets every day. Basically, Twitter seems to be cheating by making sure their trending hashtags are represented by tweets the Twitter SJWs approve of, rather than tweets actually representing the dominant sentiment and the most popular tweets in the tag.
This isn’t a trivial point, as by doing this Twitter is creating a false perception of how things are – if even a tag like #StopIslam is seen to be dominated by tweets defending Islam, it helps create the perception that hostility to Islam is a fringe sentiment, making critics of Islam less likely to speak out and more likely to self-censor for fear of becoming social pariahs. There’s a reason the MSM almost never polls people on how they feel about Muslim immigration specifically – they want people opposing Muslim Immigration to feel like lone, isolated deviants, and certainly don’t want them discovering that they may well actually be a Silent Majority.
Twitter also has business and PR incentives to manipulate Top Tweets: The perception that huge portions of Twitter’s userbase is calling out Islam and Muslims will get Twitter lots of hostile headline from SJW outlets – show the #StopIslam tag being dominated by Islam Apologism however, and those same outlets will put up glowing stories about Twitter (or at least its users), proclaiming “Faith In Humanity Restored” and the like in response to seeing people defend a hateful, authoritarian ideology with half-truths and outright lies. Yeah, SJWs suck, what else is new?
Now, is it POSSIBLE that Twitter didn’t actually manipulate the #StopIslam results, that it’s just freak occurrences in Twitter’s algorithm that consistently makes less popular Pro-Islam tweets beat out more popular Anti-Islam ones? And for this to happen only AFTER the tag was inexplicably removed from, then brought back to the list of Trending tweets? Sure, I guess it’s possible. It’s also possible that Twitter’s autocomplete function, which hasn’t autocompleted #GamerGate for months (far less popular GG-related suggestions, often negative, will pop up instead) is just completely broken, and that suggestions like these are just randomly generated:
At this point I'm almost impressed by just how nakedly biased Twitter is.#StopIslam pic.twitter.com/F9Y0DQIJRs
— Christi Junior (@ChristiJunior) March 22, 2016
However, given Twitter’s well-established history of political bias, from the SJW-dominated “Trust & Safety” Council, to admins explicitly allowing a SJW to dox his critics, I don’t have any reason to assume the hoofbeats I’m hearing belong to Unicorns as opposed to Horses. Twitter is full of shit, and a viable Pro-Free Speech alternative to it can’t appear soon enough. In the meantime, I’ll just make sure I’m acting as precisely the kind of Twitter user they don’t want their site to be represented by.
