Major social media networks were moving aggressively to crack down on serial spreaders of false and potentially inciting information, as myths about COVID and voter fraud swirled around the 2020 election.
It was the moment conservative Twitter tried to cancel itself.
In recent months, as platforms like Gettr and Truth Social have come online and expanded, the universe of users has grown — though that growth has been uneven and difficult to substantiate independently, experts said. Gab, which markets itself as a place where “all are welcome,” has said it has 20 million users. Gettr, which is run by a onetime senior aide to former President Donald Trump, Jason Miller, said in April that it had exceeded 5 million registered users.
The assertion by conservatives that they are shouted down in the public square is not altogether untrue, if the metric is measured in a specific way — say, by conservative speakers who are no longer mainstays on the college lecture circuit. Separately, the study looked at millions of news articles from American media outlets posted to Twitter in the same time frame and found that content from conservative outlets outperformed. “Outlets with a strong right-leaning bias are amplified marginally more than content from left-leaning sources,” it said.
That sense that the social media companies have devised a plot to systematically silence voices on the right, DiResta added, “feeds a grievance narrative that they’re being censored.” “A loss for people on the left, a win for people on the right — I think the extremes are overthinking this,” said Adam Sohn, CEO of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of ideological content online. “And Elon Musk is probably enjoying this,” he added.
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