Twitter suspends accounts of alt-right individuals, organizations
Some of the accounts belong to Richard Spencer, a white supremacist and a leader in the alt-right movement, and to his magazine and think tank. He has been active in advocating the creation of a white “ethnostate” in North America or Europe.
Spencer, not known for nuance or subtlety, reacted to Twitter’s move by posting a video on YouTube in which he compared the suspension of his accounts to the 1934 Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany, in which the SS, on orders from Hitler, killed hundreds of members of the SA, the rival Nazi paramilitary organization. “I think Twitter, Facebook and others are deeply triggered by this election and that social media helped elect Trump.”
“It is corporate Stalinism; there is a great purge going on … I am alive physically but digitally speaking there has been execution squads across the alt-right,” Spencer said.
CNN reports that other alt-right affiliated accounts suspended by Twitter include Pax Dickinson, founder of alt-right site WeSearchr; an alt-right Internet personality who goes by the fake name Ricky Vaughn; and blogger Paul Town, who describes himself as “the leading thought leader of alt-right.”
Dickinson, a former Business Insider CTO who was fired from Business Insider in 2013for a series of tweets, including one in which he wrote: “In The Passion of the Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of n—rs. It’s his own fault for dressing like a whore though.”
As was the case with other alt-right followers banned by Twitter, Dickinson migrated to the alt-right-heavy social network gab.ai. Ben Collins reports in the Daily Beast that Dickinson wrote the most upvoted post on gab.ai for Wednesday: “The great purge is upon us. But Twitter could have purged the #AltRight BEFORE we memed a President into the White House. They didn’t because they never believed it was possible,” Dickinson wrote. “Banning us now is too little & too late, a futile gesture of impotence. Congrats fam. #MAGA”
George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, said that as a private company, Twitter has no obligation to provide a forum for white nationalist views and is subject only to non-discrimination laws, said.
“The First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights that protects the individual from government. It doesn’t protect the individual from private companies. A company is free to do really whatever it wants,” Freeman told USA Today. “There really are no speech rights accorded to the public that uses the private company. Twitter is perfectly within its legal rights.”
On Tuesday, Twitter also rolled out a new tool to stop harassment by “trolls” with an expanded “mute” feature which allows users to block accounts sending inappropriate messages. Twitter users will be able to eliminate — or mute — notifications based on keywords, phrases, or entire conversations which they do not like.
“The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we’ve seen across the internet has risen sharply over the past few years,” Twitter said as it announced.
Twitter said that the company’s support staff have been retrained on the new policies and that internal processes have been improved to deal more effectively with reports of abusive behavior.
