In the latest chapter of “Voting Matters”, we find that Jack Dorsey’s Twitter is finally suspending the account of Project Veritas, the outfit led by archvillain James O’Keefe. For years, James O’Keefe got away with ambush video campaigns made to sow disinformation, trying to make Democrats or anyone he identifies as left-leaning or just against his point of view (which to him is the same thing) look bad under false pretenses.
Well, the jig’s up – or, when Donny’s away, the Twitter mice will play – and he’s gone from The White House for good.
What burns me is at least James O’Keefe knows why Twitter suspended the account of Project Veritas, and can identify the issue, where as my @zennie62 account was suspended two hours after I made a YouTube vlog expressing my concern that Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump was on her way to Las Vegas for a CES keynote speech, just as her dad had declared war on Iran.
Twitter never told me that was the reason, I had to guess, as I was accused only of “platform manipulation”, without true proof. One more example of blacks in tech not receiving the same treatment as our white counterparts, and not something I am ever going to shut up about. Twitter Support also wrote personal emails to me twice, like someone there had it in for me, but would not say their name.
As much damage as James O’Keefe has done, he’s never faced such treatment by Twitter. In an email to Politico, James writes:
Late last night, Twitter locked Project Veritas’s and my Twitter accounts, claiming we violated Twitter Guidelines by posting a video of our journalists asking questions of Facebook’s Vice President Guy Rosen which Rosen refused to answer. Twitter claimed the video published private information, which is false. Twitter invited Project Veritas to, and we did, appeal that decision with Twitter. In an apparent act of retaliation for daring to question their authority, Twitter responded to our appeal by suspending our account, continuing to tell us that Project Veritas could delete the tweet and have our account reinstated.”
And James O’Keefe refused to delete the tweet.
But you see how well Twitter treats the white bloggers, whereas this black blogger has never received any real explanation for the action done to me, and certainly no effort to give me a chance to think on my sins. Twitter’s racial discrimination is not only apparent in severity of punishment, but in the very design of their algorithms.
The Guardian UK pointed to the problem in this September 21, 2020 post, writing:
Twitter has apologised for a “racist” image cropping algorithm, after users discovered the feature was automatically focusing on white faces over black ones.
The company says it had tested the service for bias before it started using it, but now accepts that it didn’t go far enough.
Twitter has long automatically cropped images to prevent them taking up too much space on the main feed, and to allow multiple pictures to be shown in the same tweet. The company uses several algorithmic tools to try to focus on the most important parts of the picture, trying to ensure that faces and text remain in the cropped part of an image.
But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom.
When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland.
The extent of racism in Twitter’s tech practices runs deep – so deep, that one has to wonder if its harboring cyber-racists among its engineers? How else to explain the many examples of techno-racism?
The fact is, Twitter has long had a by-action policy of treating blacks as less than whites. In my case, even though I go as far back as being one of a less-than-handful of African Americans at the Twitter Launch Party at Mighty in San Francisco in 2006, I’ve asked for, asked for, and asked for a verified account. Never got one.
Stay tuned.