While speaking at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California compared big tech censorship of conservatives to the “social score” system that the Chinese government uses to persecute political and religious dissidents.
McCarthy joined Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Donald Trump Jr. and Amber Athey of Spectator USA in participating in a panel discussion on the “right path forward for big tech.”
The panel comes as conservatives have for years complained about how social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have censored their content or taken negative action against their accounts for voicing political or religious beliefs at odds with far-left and progressive viewpoints.
The social media giants have been accused of shadow banning and demonetizing conservatives’ accounts as well as censoring posts they deem as hateful.
“Did you see what recently was leaked by Twitter, what they are going to do next?” McCarthy asked. “They are going to allow liberal activists to determine whether your [post] is harmful or not. It’s like China’s social scoring.”
McCarthy was referencing an NBC News report of a leaked Twitter demo suggesting that the platform is experimenting with a new feature that would label tweets from certain politicians or public figures as misinformation.
Under one iteration of the system, according to NBC News, Twitter users could earn “points” and a “community badge” if they “contribute in good faith and act like a good neighbor” as well as “provide critical context to help people understand the information they see.”
Twitter’s demo used a McCarthy tweet from last September as an example.
“[Twitter] took an article I put up from The Federalist. They allowed these liberal activists to say this was harmful and wrong. Do you know why? Because we called out the whistleblower,” McCarthy explained. “Somehow that was wrong. They are letting these socialist ideas to be able to control what we are doing. That is what’s wrong. If they control so much of the market and they say, ‘it is just an algorithm,’ a human writes the algorithm.”
By comparison, China’s social credit system is a high-tech system that tracks citizens’ social actions and awards points based on whether their actions and beliefs are in line with the communist government.
SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith
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