Twitter tries to cover for Hillary’s disaster in Libya
I tend to be skeptical and I invite everyone to be skeptical of the accusation I’m about to make in this blog post. One of the biggest stories last night and this morning was the U.S. bombing of ISIS targets in Libya. As a blogger, naturally I was curious, “What are people saying on Twitter?”
So I searched, “Hillary Libya,” on Twitter’s search feature and this is what I found. The “Top Story” that popped up was an article from Vox titled, “Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They’re wrong.”
How blatant is that? So I figured maybe all these liberal, (never mind this isn’t a liberal position) pro-Hillary sites must be pushing out this story. However, when you click the article, it’s from April. It’s not even a current article.
FISHY! Search "Hillary Libya" the top story is this. Click date and the tweet only shared 9 times! @wikileaks below pic.twitter.com/3Ut7txPYLg
— iroots.org activism (@irootsorg) August 2, 2016
Could this be evidence of a similar bias uncovered at Facebook‘s headquarters? If so, we’ll only know if someone inside decides to expose it. I would argue that this case potentially goes beyond partisan politics. This could be an example of a social media corporation trying to manipulate opinions about foreign policy. In short, lives are potentially at stake.
Was this promoted, ‘Top News’ tweet popular? Look for yourself. Despite being the number one Tweet that pops up, at the time of posting this it only had 9 retweets.
Yes. Hillary Clinton was (and still is) right on Libya https://t.co/QfH0pHAQbT https://t.co/neUAfC9Iqw
— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) August 1, 2016
I reached out to the author of the article and the blog (one and the same) and he also seemed a bit surprised that his tweet was promoted. After about 4 hours, the tweet stopped appearing on the top of the search results.
I can’t prove it, but it sure makes me wonder if someone at Twitter was trying to manipulate the narrative around Hillary’s involvement in Libya. It didn’t work this time.
It seems pretty fishy to me and I think there ought to be some answers from Twitter about how they curate their “Top News.”
#SeeSomethingSaySomething
For more background, see our other post on Hillary’s disaster in Libya.