Speaker 1: This next story is just an incredible display of hypocrisy
from Donald Trump and the so-called pro free speech right wing truth social. The Twitter
copy that Trump made after he got kicked off Twitter about a year and a half ago is reportedly
banning users for being critical of what happens to the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th,
2021. There are a number of reports of users claiming that their accounts were suspended for
talking about what exactly happened on the sixth and talking about the hearings and talking about
things that just simply make Donald Trump look bad. Let's take a look at some of the screenshots
of people going to Twitter to complain about how they were censored on truth social. A username.
Jack said I was suspended from Truth Social for posting about the January 6th hearing last night.
Donald Trump is scared of free speech. Joseph wrote Just put out my first post on Truth Social
and they deleted it. Real freedom of speech champs there. And then a user named Travis said, quote,
My truth social account was just permanently suspended for talking about the January 6th
committee hearings, including a screenshot of his account being suspended. And I feel like you
already know what the analysis is going to be here. This is just the most hypocritical thing
possible because like the whole point of truth, social was supposed to be that it was going to
allow for free speech and the free exchange of ideas, and they were not going to censor people
and ban people needlessly and all these different things. But then you take a look at how it's been
in practice, and it's basically just been like the right wing Trumpian version of Twitter, which is
fine if they want to do that. But it was marketed originally as a free speech version of the popular
social media site, so they're not really doing the things that they set out to do. And the second
that they see something that they don't like, that they disagree with, it's not talking about
the insurrection, things, talking about Trump looking bad. They decided to take down the post,
they suspend the accounts. And there's actually an argument to be made that they're actually
being more censorious than Twitter is with some of these moves that they've made. So what exactly is
the point of truth, social? I don't know at this point. They're changing it day to day, it seems.
Maybe it's just really to make a site where Trump is able to speak his mind and he needed
to do something that involved other users because the blog posts that he had, the official messages
from the office of the former president, that just wasn't cutting it anymore. And the bottom line is,
they don't care about the. Hypocrisy, right. Republicans in recent years, they just don't
even respond to the points about hypocrisy burning when we point out that they're doing one thing and
saying another. And what also isn't new is the fact that truth social has these policies,
because even before they launched, it was clear that they were going to censor certain posts
when it comes to disinformation, when it comes to sensitive content. And then they also said
something at the very beginning, which was that they were going to prohibit posts that disparage,
tarnish or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and or the site. So on truth, socially, you can get
censored or banned for daring to criticize Donald Trump or Devin Nunes or the website at large.
And again, this goes to the point about this is actually more censorious than Twitter is, because
it's not like Twitter has an analogous policy to this. You can go on Twitter and criticize Twitter.
You can go on Twitter and criticize the executives there. Clearly, there's a line you can't cross
with the criticism. Right? You can't be like threatening anyone, but you're able to do generic
criticism just fine on Twitter. And while we're on the topic of Republican hypocrisy on this issue,
I wonder if now that Republicans want Twitter and these other social media platforms to be regulated
like public utilities, if they would say the same thing about truth, social, if they want truth
social to be nationalized or socialized. I'm not holding my breath. I would imagine that they want
it for Twitter but not for truth social. So that's just the latest on truth social. I do think that
we're going to be talking more and more about it as the months go on, because it appeared at first
that this was going to die out because they had a really bad launch from a tech perspective and
things weren't working right. And also, there was the news about Elon Musk planning to buy
Twitter. So there was this idea that he was going to allow Trump back on Twitter. And at that point,
why even have a social media site of your own? Why not just go back to Twitter? But for now,
Truth Social is here to stay and we'll have to continue covering the blatant hypocrisy.