Our politicians have no idea how the Internet works

Here’s the bad news: We can’t trust Silicon Valley to police itself. Here’s the other bad news: We can’t trust Washington politicians to police it, either. Our policymakers are ill prepared to protect the public from those who wish us harm — or even from companies willing to profit off that harm. Case in point ... 

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), aspiring speaker of the House, tweeted: “Another day, another example of conservatives being censored on social media.” He added the hashtag “#StopTheBias” and called for Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to “explain to Congress what is going on.” The cause of McCarthy’s complaint? He was annoyed that a tweet by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, retweeting a Drudge Report missive, wasn’t immediately visible to him because Twitter said it contained “potentially sensitive content.” As a Twitter executive pointed out, this was due to two factors: The Drudge Report has flagged its own tweets as “potentially sensitive”; and Rep McCarthy had set his Twitter account preferences to hide any tweets flagged this way. In other words, Rep McCarthy was censoring his own Twitter feed, something he could easily reverse by changing his account settings. Confronting face-palming mockery, Rep McCarthy nonetheless doubled down, still claiming political persecution.