Twitter Part of Efforts to Interfere With US Elections: Gingrich

People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in this illustration picture taken on Sept. 27, 2013. Kacper Pempel/Illustration/Reuters

The revelations coming from Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, about the platform’s behind-the-scenes operation to suppress certain viewpoints has been “pretty horrifying” and shows that the platform was part of the efforts to interfere with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In the span of a week, Musk has released troves of internal documents, shedding light on Twitter’s “secret blacklists” and censorship tools that worked to censor the unflattering coverage of Hunter Biden.

“If you take the president of the United States off of Twitter, what did that cost? If you are Google, and in the last four days of every month, you refuse to deliver Republican fundraising emails, what does that cost?” Gingrich, an Epoch Times contributor, said in a Dec. 9 interview, referencing Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach and allegations that Google had filtered millions of the Republican National Committee’s political campaign emails to spam folders at the end of each month.

“These things should be considered federal election commission violations, because they are actions by a corporation to reshape the election.”

But it’s not just Trump and Republicans who are affected, Gingrich noted, pointing to the “visibility filtering” tool Twitter used to limit certain individuals’ reach without their knowledge.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was one of the users added to the blacklist for saying that the COVID-19 lockdowns would harm children, according to Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press who worked with Musk to disclose the Twitter files.

Stanford University professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a founding fellow of Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington on March 17, 2022. Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times

Like the “world-renowned scientists who are making scientific points which they—the bureaucrats at Twitter—decided were not acceptable,” other users on the platform could find themselves in a similar spot, Gingrich said.

“It’s a pretty amazing story of censorship in a country which is dedicated to the First Amendment right of free speech,” he said.

But similar activities are likely repeated on Facebook and Google, which, Gingrich said, are also “overwhelmingly Democrat.”

Campaign finance data from 2020 show that Facebook and Twitter together contributed 12 times more money to Democrats than Republicans, at about $5.5 million and less than $435,000 respectively.

Gingrich believes that these major social media platforms have become so integrated with people’s lives that they should be considered public utilities and regulated as such.

“Think about the telephone company,” he said. “We won’t allow the telephone company to discriminate against who you’re allowed to call or what you’re allowed to say.”

In like fashion, electricity companies can’t refuse service to a group based on race or faith.

“You’re dealing with large public utilities that have enormous power, and you cannot allow them to just arbitrarily use that power for their own political interest,” Gingrich said.

The suspended Twitter account of President Donald Trump appears on a laptop screen on Jan. 8, 2021. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A third volume of files dealing with Twitter’s censorship of Trump was released on Dec. 9. A fifth volume of files, which deal with Twitter’s banning of Trump, was released on Dec. 12; the latest installment indicated that some of the social media giant’s staffers pushed for Trump to be barred following last year’s Capitol breach, even though no policy violations were found in the then-president’s tweets.

Musk also has announced software updates allowing users to see if the content is being made undiscoverable and to appeal such decisions.

Such a decision is “a great step in the right direction,” said Gingrich, who noted that Musk has impressed him with his “willingness to rip off the cover and let people see what’s going on.”

“I think the more he does that, the better off we'll all be,” he said.