Tweets tied to Drudge Report censored? Jack Dorsey singled out for 'weird' situation
A Twitter account that tweets out stories posted to the Drudge Report, a top right-leaning news aggregator, is accusing Twitter of sneaking into account settings and forcing a layer of censorship on tweets.
A tweet early Sunday, from a Twitter account that on a daily basis tweets out stories posted to the Drudge Report website, tagged Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and demanded that the "weird" situation come to an end.
"Dear @jack please stop your staff from changing my account settings without my knowledge. I am not a porn star or terrorist. Just some dude retweeting a news source for now 10 years, based in [San Francisco], your hometown. Love @Twitter but it's become weird," the tweet said.
Dear @jack please stop your staff from changing my account settings without my knowledge. I am not a porn star or terrorist. Just some dude retweeting a news source for now 10 years, based in SF, your hometown. Love @Twitter but it's become weird. pic.twitter.com/wA9KRUZzSN
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) June 10, 2018
The tweet included a photo of "Tweet media" settings in which a check is placed in the box for "Mark media you Tweet as containing material that may be sensitive."
Dorsey has yet to reply. A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately return a request for comment.
Twitter and Drudge Report are competitors in the traffic referral arena. They are two of the Internet's top sources of traffic, according to a report by technology company Parse.ly this year.
The Drudge Report account, which has over a million followers, appears to have been dealing with censorship for some time and has attracted scrutiny from Congress.
About two months after the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., last week raised the alarm about Drudge Report "being censored by Twitter," Nunes again nailed the social media platform for putting up a wall separating users from the website. "I just looked on Twitter," Nunes said on "Sunday Morning Futures" with Maria Bartiromo. "The Drudge Report is being censored today, so for the last three or four days I haven't been able to get on the Drudge Report because it's being censored on Twitter."
He connected the matter to the larger issue of censorship and bias conservatives face in the technology arena, days after a Google search showed the word "Nazism" in an information box about the California Republican Party's ideology. "So this censorship of conservatives and Republicans and conservative values continues in this country and here in California we're on the front lines," he said.
In March, Nunes asked his followers on Twitter to retweet his message about censorship if they had seen the same warning messages about the Drudge Report on their Twitter feed. That tweet was retweeted 13,000 times.
Editor's note: This story has been updated
Editor's note: This story has corrected to say that the Twitter account for the Drudge Report is not a verified account affiliated with the news aggregator and its editor, Matt Drudge.
https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/tweets-tied-to-drudge-report-censored-jack-dorsey-singled-out-for-weird-situation