Social media giant Twitter has begun their censorship in the form of a purge. Focusing on right-leaning accounts, Twitter has begun suspending well-known conservative users from their site.
Twitter began enforcing their new censorship rules to combat “hateful and abusive content” (aka, anything not leftist in nature according to conservatives) Monday and a number of well-known far-right organizations and users were suspended. The changes to the policy were announced last month and broadened Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” to permanently suspend any account—covering usernames, profile bios, and display names—that displays “violent threats, multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear or reduces someone to less than human.”
According to Fox News, this will presumably include countless accounts bearing Nazi flags, swastikas, and similar symbols, but it certainly won’t stop there. Conservatives fear they will be shut down simply for disagreeing with the communist rhetoric Twitter allows.
Today I have received more abusive tweets and threatening messages than any other day in the past month. Congratulations on the new "policy". #TwitterPurge
— Craig R. Brittain for US Senate (R-AZ 2018) (@SenatorBrittain) December 18, 2017
Twitter’s crackdown on free speech is surely a simple way for them to continue to promote only the hardened communist ideals which have killed 100 million people in the past few decades.
So far, the mainstream media is calling this “purge” one of only the extremist hate groups. However, anyone with at least a few functioning brain cells understands that once censorship begins it will continue an in all likelihood, disproportionately affect those who disagree with the standard vein of mainstream opinion.
Among the accounts suspended Monday are those of white nationalist Jared Taylor and his American Renaissance group, and British far-right activists Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding, along with the American Nazi Party. Later in the day, Twitter suspended an account belonging to the New Black Panther Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization” that encourages violence against whites and Jews. In all fairness, Twitter has maintained their reputation by purging some left-wing hate groups from the social media platform too.
As a private company, Twitter has the legal and constitutional right to block any speech it wants, since the First Amendment only applies to the government’s control of speech. Ironically though, for years, Twitter billed itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” exerting little control over its legions of anonymous users.
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