Update – May 9, 2019: Nick Monroe successfully appealed his Twitter account lock out and has had his full account functionality restored.
Twitter’s purge of conservatives is continuing with three prominent accounts suspended in the last 24 hours. The three accounts had 400,000+ total Twitter followers at the time they were suspended and were the accounts of Trump supporter CC (290,900+ followers), meme maker Carpe Donktum (91,800+ followers), and journalist Nick Monroe (45,900+ followers).
CC has been suspended for seven days for this tweet. Twitter claims the tweet violates its policies around abusive behavior.
Carpe Donktum has also had his Twitter account limited for posting a meme which Twitter says violates its rules around abusive behavior. His account will remain in a limited state until he deletes this tweet.
If he deletes the tweet, he’ll receive a 12 hour suspension and then regain full account functionality. If he doesn’t delete the tweet, his account will be locked in a limited state indefinitely.
Carpe Donktum’s account lockdown came after Brian Krassenstein, an editor at Hill Reporter, called on his 690,000+ followers to mass report the meme to Twitter.
Finally, Nick Monroe has had his Twitter account locked down for supposedly violating the same Twitter rules around abusive behavior with this tweet. The full tweet shows that Monroe was retweeting someone and saying that he appreciates compliments but feels he could always be doing more:
If Monroe deletes the tweet, his account will be limited for a further seven days and then he’ll regain full access. If he doesn’t remove the tweet, his account will remain in a limited state.
In addition to these suspensions, the conservative writer David Horowitz has had his Twitter account mysteriously suspended and reinstated twice in the last 24 hours. Twitter hasn’t commented on the second suspension or any of the reinstatements but Horowitz claims the first suspension was related to his response to Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. This is the tweet which Horowitz says triggered his first account suspension.
And there’s more. Twitter has also been suspending accounts that parody high profile Democrats and their supporters. It recently banned a popular account that parodied Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and a smaller parody account of lawyer Michael Avenatti.
In the same 24 hours, Twitter took no action against the account of Democrat Congressman Brian Sims when he posted a video asking his Twitter followers to dox some protestors outside of Planned Parenthood, despite Twitter’s Lead of Trust and Safety, Legal, and Public Policy Vijaya Gadde previously claiming that Twitter is focused on taking action against doxing first to protect physical safety.
Beyond the last 24 hours, Twitter also locked actor James Woods and former Sheriff of Milwaukee County David Clarke out of their accounts in April. Both of these people are vocal supporters of President Trump.
This mass-purge of conservative Twitter accounts follows a similar mass-purge of Facebook accounts last week of which the majority were conservatives. Many political commentators believe these sweeping bans across social media along with other recent changes are part of a coordinated effort to silence conservatives and supporters of President Trump in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections.
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