According to a new report by tech website Motherboard, Twitter has the capabilities to purge white-supremacist content from its platform completely. Twitter has, after all, successfully come up with algorithms that reduced the Islamic State's social media presence, which made up the bulk of the terrorist group's propaganda and recruiting efforts. The problem, according to an anonymous employee who spoke with Motherboard, is that if the social media giant tried to used the same tools to fight neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it would sweep up a considerable number of Republican politicians' accounts too. Per Motherboard:

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, [the employee] explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said. In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians. The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

An obvious example is Iowa representative Steve King, the man who questioned why "white nationalist" was an offensive term, claimed that civilization was the product of white people alone, and on immigration said that the U.S. can't repopulate itself with "other people's babies."

J.M. Berger, a researcher on extremism, told Motherboard, "Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted." And Twitter is already facing pressure from conservatives in the U.S. and around the world for an alleged (and largely unfounded) anti-conservative bias. The conspiracy is so pervasive that Donald Trump reportedly complained about it at a meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this week.

For its part, Twitter maintained to Motherboard "that is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level." But the company has shown that it's capable of handling extremist content when it decides to (like ISIS). If Twitter really is pulling its punches in order to appear apolitical, it may be time for the company to seriously reevaluate its priorities.