Tell Laura

Laura Ingraham telling better than two and a half million viewers about the plot that has silenced her and all her friends.

Sorry I can't hear you. Your tweet is all strangely muffled. Are you ok?

— Gestating Turkey (@Yastreblyansky) August 25, 2018

I took a look at the Federalist piece Ingraham links, "Despite Twitter’s Protests, The Stifling of Conservative Speech On The Platform Is Real", by David Reaboi and Nick Short, and was taken aback by the opening graf:

Twitter does not discriminate against conservative viewpoints. That’s the story the social media giant desperately wants to tell — from their CEO Jack Dorsey’s interviews, to their employees tasked with outreach to conservatives in their Washington offices. Literally, it’s true. The complete picture, however, is less flattering to the social media giant.

Literally it's true but figuratively Twitter is lying? If you consider all the elements beyond literal that you could consider, the metaphor, synecdoche, and above all our friend the hyperbole, then it's true that Twitter is censoring conservatives?

Or are we supposed to be thinking about this in terms of what we could call "Trump-literalness", as in the advice that we shouldn't be taking Trump literally but we should be taking him seriously? If we shouldn't take it literally that the "stifling of conservative speech" on the Internet "is real", should we be taking it seriously? It's imaginary, admittedly, but it's extremely serious? I beg your pardon?

(I should say it's true that the Twitter experience has changed for me, a good deal, since the introduction of the default Quality Filter in late 2016 and the 1000 "behavioral signals" used to identify abusive or troll or spam content last May; I'm seeing a lot less offensive stuff, and I don't have a good way of knowing if I'm missing stuff I'd like to see as well. It's more homogeneous for me, and less like a war zone, but I follow a good number of reactionary or fascist accounts just to be sure, and so I don't get a sense I'm being protected from conservatives. I'm still connected to the bots I like—Finnegans Wake and so on—but I don't see any of the Russian ones any more unless Ingraham or Don Jr. or another of those clowns recommends them. I no longer find myself in the situation I was in from time to time in 2015 where I could actually help some hillbilly regressive find out how to get on Obamacare, which is a shame—that was more useful than just sharing outrage with all my friends—but that feels more like me being censored than them, which it is—I'm getting trolled much less than I was three years ago because the trolls aren't seeing me. I really don't care do u? Clearly the world of Twitter is vast, and it really needs to be filtered somehow. If you feel it's overprotecting you, follow more people you don't like. If you feel it's overprotecting people you don't like, the way Laura Ingraham apparently does, there's just nothing in the First Amendment that requires us to read Laura Ingraham if we don't want to. If Laura Ingraham is the key element that's been missing from your life, I'm sure you'll find your way to her sooner or later.)