If you feel like the censorship on Twitter is a bit slanted in one direction, you're not wrong.
Nick Pacilio, Kamala Harris’s former press secretary, is now in charge of deciding announcing what the president of the United States can and can’t say on Twitter to his 85 million followers. Twitter has already removed debatable contentions by the president — or, contentions no more misleading than any number of Joe Biden allegations. The point of removing tweets, I assume, has more to do with being able to call Trump a liar than worrying about his spreading misleading information.
But the optics are remarkably terrible for Twitter. It’s almost certainly true that whoever holds the job of senior communication manager at the social-media giant will be ideologically progressive like the company’s CEO. But could you imagine what the nightly reaction on CNN and MSNBC would be if Mike Pence’s former spokesperson was seen censoring Joe Biden’s tweets during a presidential election? I have no doubt Democrats would be calling for congressional hearings.
Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, questions witnesses during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on social media influence in the 2016 U.S. elections in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017. The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee berated lawyers for social media giants Facebook, Twitter and Google for a lethargic response to Russian interference in U.S. politics, as the companies' lawyers faced a second day of grilling in Congress. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images