Last week, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and CEO, responded to accusations that Twitter was “shadow-banning” right-wing content and prominent Republican accounts by limiting their appearances in search. While Dorsey explained that Twitter has its own algorithm to rank particular tweets and accounts and to minimize the appearance of harmful and hateful ones, he maintained that the company’s sorting isn’t based on political ideology.
The fact that Dorsey had to speak up at all was a consequence of Republican outrage, which holds that social media platforms are discriminating against the right. These arguments and accusations should sound familiar: Republicans are taking a page out of their tired, true and effective media strategy of “playing the ref.” It’s an approach they’ve used for decades to encourage media companies to overcompensate, thereby boosting loud partisan voices, and it’s found new purchase in our contemporary climate of social media platforms.
As a political strategy, “playing the ref” dates back at least to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, in which Goldwater handed out “Eastern liberal press” pins to journalists. It reached fever pitch during the paranoid years of the Nixon administration, saw great success in Reagan-era arguments against the fairness doctrine and has remained critical to the GOP playbook in the decades since. Explaining the tactic in 2003, Eric Alterman wrote, “Their mau-mauing the other side is just a good way to get their own ideas across — or perhaps prevent the other side from getting a fair hearing for theirs.” Indeed, as with sports, the more you play the ref, the more hesitant the ref will be to make calls against you — and may even rule in your favor.
