I wrote earlier about YouTube’s latest act of censorship: they have deleted our video of Heather Mac Donald demonstrating that there is no epidemic of police racism directed at black men. Heather’s conclusion is an indisputable fact, but it undermines a key narrative that the Democrats are counting on in November, so YouTube doesn’t want the word to get out.
Social media companies censor all the time. The striking thing is that they pretty much always censor conservatives, usually for no apparent reason. We have all seen countless examples of such censorship, but this one strikes me as particularly telling: Tim Tebow gets censored by Twitter for Christian message: Labelled ‘sensitive content’.
After Tim Tebow posted a powerful Christian message to his Twitter page on Monday, fans were stunned when it was censored by the social media site and labelled as “sensitive content.”
Twitter is now saying that this was an error, with a spokesman for the social media company telling The Blaze, “The Tweet…was flagged as potentially sensitive media in error. It has been corrected.”
“Flagged” is a great weasel word. Who flagged it? Was it a human being, or a computer algorithm? Did a Twitter employee “flag” it, or was it “flagged” by a complaint from a lunatic lefty? And what element of Tebow’s tweet caused it to be “flagged”? The tweet was something you could hear in any church on any Sunday, probably in synagogues and mosques, too:
“Bible believers, when we look at the Bible, and we see a lot of the heroes, a lot of times they truly were wounded deeply before they were ever used greatly,” the former NFL quarterback said. “So maybe you’re going through a time in your life where you feel like you’ve just been wounded greatly. It hasn’t been your year, hasn’t been your day — you just don’t feel like this is your time.”
“This could be your time for learning,” Tebow warned. “This could be your time for growing. This could be your time for adapting. This could be the time that is a test for you, but tomorrow it gets turned into a testimony.”
He added that God could be preparing us for greater challenges in the future.
“You never know what God is doing with your life,” Tebow said. “You never know what He is preparing you for. So many times in the Bible, when we look at the heroes, there were times in their life where — if they stopped, if they quit, if they said, ‘No, God, I’ve had enough’ — then they would have missed out on the most impactful, most influential times of their life.”
“Maybe that is the next step for you,” he added. “Maybe that is tomorrow. Maybe that is next week, maybe that is next year. But when we quit, we will never know what we missed out on. We will never know what’s in store for us.”
This is an entirely conventional, and admirable, inspirational talk. The interesting question, which Twitter and the other Big Tech companies never answer, is why Tebow’s tweet was “flagged as potentially sensitive media.” Twitter, truth be told, isn’t all that sensitive. I have referred to Twitter as a cesspool. Death threats directed at conservatives are common. The Ayatollah Khameini has a Twitter feed. It’s not like Twitter has high standards. But somehow, conservative content–in this case, traditional Judeo/Christian content–keeps getting “flagged” and deleted, at least temporarily.
What happened here? If a computer algorithm “flagged” Tebow’s tweet, my guess is that it was the opening phrase, “Bible believers,” that did it. “Bible believers” isn’t multicultural and inclusive. On the other hand, if you said “Koran believers,” that’s different. Because it’s multicultural and….well anyway, it’s different.
The other possibility is that Tebow’s tweets are subject to what the federal courts would call heightened scrutiny. Tim Tebow could be described as the hydroxychloroquine of professional athletes. Some years ago he became popular among conservatives. That made him a symbol of evil (or something) with the liberal herd. So anything he says is considered dubious and might be “flagged.” That, too, could be what happened here.
One way or another, Twitter has again demonstrated its bias against the American mainstream.
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