You may have heard about the two guys that were caught cheating in a fishing tournament a couple of months ago. This past October, Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky were competing in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament in Ohio. This was not a small-fry event, and the tournament grand prize was set at nearly $30,000. Runyan and Cominsky were also a sponsored team, meaning companies had put their own good names on the line to sponsor these two.
But the old jokes about the tall tales of fishermen lost their humor altogether when the tournament master felt that the scales just didn’t seem right. What looked to the judge to be a 4-pound Walleye weighed out at nearly 8 pounds. This did not appear reasonable so the Judge took the unusual step of grabbing one of the fish and cutting it open in front of the crowd and to everyone’s shock and amazement the fish was filled with lead fishing weights!
You can imagine the reactions as every single one of the fish the two cheats had turned in was cut open with each one containing lead weights and some containing loose fish filets which were probably used to cover the weights if someone looked down the fish’s gullet.
The videos of the crowds reaction sounded an awful lot like a lynch mob was forming and those two guys were lucky to make it out of there with their own skin intact. Two weeks later the two scale-tipping fishermen were indicted on multiple felony counts for cheating, and attempted grand theft, among other charges. Tipping the scales is never a good idea, and in this case it was a crime.
I did some research on the issue of using false weights to tip scales in someone’s favor. It turns out that the Bible mentions using false weights nearly a dozen times. For instance, in Proverbs 11:1 it says, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.”
Keep in mind that scales were a part of daily commerce in Biblical times. Coinage existed but coins were often checked by weight to ensure that they weighed the appropriate amount. Coins of that era were not nearly as precise as we have today. They would be used and abused and broken and worn down, and as they aged, coins would lose weight and therefore the amount of precious metal in the coins had to be verified by weights on a scale. But it was a notorious practice for moneychangers to have differing sets of weights. An “official” weight might be labeled for 1 Shekel (roughly 11.5 grams) but it might really weigh 1.5 Shekels and thus a trader would be cheated out of more coinage in order to balance the scales.
From this ancient scam we get the old adage of “tipping the scales” which has become an analogous phrase used to describe cheating for thousands of years.
That said, tipping the scales is the perfect description of what happened with Twitter in the past few years.
By now you’ve heard that what was suspicioned all along regarding Twitter staff suppressing conservative views is being proven outright with actual evidence - not circumstantial, or anecdotal - but actual evidence. Twitter staff and executives chose to make sure that the scales were tipped toward their ideological and political desires knowing full well the impact of those decisions.
Some of you may still see this as nothing more than a private company simply exercising its own freedom of speech, and you would be able to pose those arguments to some degree. But in truth no one, no company, is allowed to infringe upon another’s civil liberties by claiming to exercise their own.
The world already takes issue with the unfair advantages of insider trading, or of market suppression when one company keeps a better product away from consumers. We would not take lightly any pharmaceutical company withholding information on its products being less than advertised. Auto manufacturers have to declare reasonably accurate gas mileage. Truth-in-lending is a matter of law. Why then would Twitter get a pass for intentionally changing the version of truth that many Americans look to them for?
Twitter staff and executives knew exactly what they were doing. The Pew Institute did a study in 2016 that indicated that at that time 62% of all US adults got their news on social media. The same study indicated that Twitter was then the 3rd highest for usage in social media for folks seeking news, just behind Reddit and Facebook. At the time of the study the results indicated that 16% of all US adults used Twitter and of those roughly 60% of them got their news on Twitter, so by basic extrapolation you can cipher out that Twitter alone accounted for roughly 10% of the voting age population when it comes to getting (or in some cases “not” getting) their news.
Don’t think for a second that Twitter didn’t know that. They knew exactly what their reach was and over time that reach grew even larger. With sophisticated algorithms and marketing strategies to track usage Twitter’s gatekeepers knew that they were in fact the new scale for measuring out news.
We call it “trending”: How big is the story? Well, how much is it trending? How many of the literally millions of voting age Americans are seeing a story? One hundred years ago the news trends were set by kids standing on the street corner yelling “extra extra read all about it!” but now the speed of news is accompanied by a hashtag.
Twitter knew this, but Twitter execs and staffers hated the idea of conservative views and opposing positions and stories that benefited the right side of politics getting out, so Twitter staff and executives decided among themselves to literally tip the scales.
There is other evidence of the bias among Twitter decision makers. A New York Post story just twelve months ago made note that 99% of the Twitter employees who gave to political campaigns supported democrats. Records of the Federal Election Commission indicate that in 2021 561 donations were made by Twitter employees through the Democrat fundraising arm ActBlue, while just 8 were made to the Republican fundraising processor WinRed. Outside of those ActBlue and WinRed donations there were several donations made direct to campaigns that amounted to thousands of dollars to Democrat candidates like Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, Mark Kelley, and others. Just one notable donation was made to a Republican but that was to the infamous Never-Trumper Adam Kinzinger.
With regard to the Hunter Biden laptop, we can now see that Twitter staff openly discussed the razors edge they were walking by affirmatively suppressing that story, but they did so anyway. Many experts believe that millions who relied on Twitter to get their news had the scales tipped in Biden’s favor by ideologues who carried differing weights for conservatives.
Just after Jan. 6, 2021, Twitter permanently banned then-President Donald Trump. Emails between Twitter Execs now show that they knew that doing so was a violation of their own policies. But they did so anyway and by doing so they basically tipped the scales to avoid having Trump be heard.
There was a definite ideology at play at Twitter. They owned the weights that went upon the information scales that many millions of Americans relied upon. But they used false weights. A false set of measuring devices. One set of weights for liberals and one for conservatives.
Deuteronomy 25:13-16 says, “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a large and a small. You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. You shall have a full and just weight; you shall have a full and just measure, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”
Twitter tipped the info scales and, just like a pair of cheating fishermen, the crowd has now seen them for what they are.
To contact Phil or request him for a speaking engagement, go to www.rightsideradio.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819News.com.
Don't miss out! Subscribe to our newsletter and get our top stories every weekday morning.
