Ted Cruz is mad Twitter won't censor Biden for telling the truth

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) took to Twitter Thursday to express his frustration that social media outlets had, as he called it, “censored” Donald Trump far more frequently than they did President-elect Joe Biden. But he failed to acknowledge that the outlets flag Trump for his near-constant spread of disinformation.

Cruz retweeted a link to a report by far-right outlet Newsbusters, a site that’s rated “mixed” on factual reporting credibility by the website Media Bias/Fact Check.

Cruz retweeted a line from Newsbusters’ report: “Before the election, Twitter and Facebook had censored [Trump] 65 times but left former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, unscathed.”

“65 to ZERO,” he added for emphasis.

The report Cruz cited claimed that, looking back over a longer span of time, Trump had been “censored” or flagged for false information 486 times since May 2018.

And 400 of those were in the days following the Nov. 3 election, when he was most busy on Twitter peddling outright lies and false claims of widespread voter fraud.

Cruz appears to imply that Trump is targeted due to anti-Republican bias on the part of social media companies, ignoring his pushing of false, widely debunked claims on Twitter and Facebook.

According to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column, Trump had made more than 22,000 false or misleading claims to the American people as of the end of August 2020, the latest the writers had been able to catch up with.

Between Election Day and Nov. 27, Twitter flagged more than 200 of Trump’s tweets for sharing false information.

This is not the first time Cruz has griped about having to be truthful on social media.

During congressional hearings in mid-November on the actions of tech companies during the election, Cruz went toe to toe with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Accusing Senate Democrats of pushing social media outlets to “abuse their power more” and “silence voices that Senate Democrats disagree with,” he argued that tech CEOS like Dorsey enforced policies in a “partisan and selective manner.”

“That is very dangerous if we want to maintain a free and fair democracy,” Cruz said.

The Washington Post published a study earlier this year that found little evidence that social media platforms are biased against conservative viewpoints.

According to Steven Johnson, an information technology professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, “If anything, there is evidence that content from highly conservative news sites is favored by Facebook algorithms.”

Despite these and other analyses of social media platforms that find right-wing influencers dominating the narrative on key issues this year, Cruz and other Republican lawmakers continue to claim that “Big Tech” censors conservative voices.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.