Jerry Bowyer | On August 20, 2018

Twitter is engaged in numerous controversies regarding political bias. Previously, conservative African-American activist Candace Owens brilliantly exposed Twitter hypocrisy. Owens took the tweets of Sarah Jeong, an extreme left-wing writer who routinely tweeted anti-white comments, and who was just hired by the New York Times, and substituted the names of other races and religions and sent them out. Jeong has been a member in good standing of the Twitter-verse and has never been suspended. But almost immediately Owens was suspended. Conservatives threw the bias flag onto the field, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey eventually apologized.

More recently President Trump called Twitter out for shadow banning republican leaders. I did a commentary for Townhall Review on this topic:

Jerry Bowyer: Twitter and the Political Bias of Social Media Giants

Anybody who’s paying attention to the news knows that Twitter’s leadership is politically biased. But you might not know that the social media giant has gone beyond censoring alleged extreme right-wing users to “shadow-banning” mainstream GOP congressmen.

“Shadow-banning” is when an account and their tweets are hidden from others without the user being notified.

In a public statement, Twitter denied that they shadow-ban people—but they changed the definition of shadow-ban in order to do so. And then they undid the bans, which they denied ever having made in the first place.

Of course, twitter has a 1st amendment right to ban whatever speech they want to.

But: If Twitter executives use corporate resources to push their own political hobbies, then they are misusing shareholder assets, and they should stop … now.

You can listen to the commentary here.

Conservatives have been appealing to a sense of fairness. I’m not optimistic about that. My view is that when they ‘feel the heat, then they see the light’. Twitter is not owned by CEO Jack Dorsey any longer. He sold his company to the general public; it belongs to the shareholders now. All of Twitter’s assets are shareholders’ assets. The lists, the software, the big data treasure trove… that’s the shareholders’.

It’s time that they speak up. Political bias by social media companies is alienating tens of millions of Americans, many of them customers, almost all of them potential customers. Further, these companies are already on thin ice, politically speaking. Dems (whom they favor) won’t defend them because they don’t like big companies and because they find social media a useful scapegoat in their attempt to blame the election of Donald Trump on Russian meddling. Conservatives would tend to be more favorable toward big business, but this is a big business which is stiffing them every chance it gets. They’re not going to burn a lot of calories bending over backwards to defend FaceGoogTwitt. That means that these companies are left without political cover with no margin for error. If they don’t care about fairness, okay, fine. But if they care about making enough money to keep the doors open, they’d better see the light.

Originally published on Townhall Finance.

Jerry Bowyer

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership.

Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups.

Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted “The Kudlow Report”, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins. Jerry is the President of Bowyer Research.

Jerry consulted extensively with the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the recent economic crisis. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED’s On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest-hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet The Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, HUD Secretary, former Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice, former Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.

Jerry has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent’s College, and guest lectured at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Heinz School of Public Policy. In 1997 Jerry gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Robert Morris University. He was the youngest speaker in the history of the school, and the school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry’s speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.

Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.