In its latest demonstration of political disingenuousness, Twitter temporarily suspended Turning Point USA communications director Candace Owens’ account — after she took racist tweets from New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong, replaced the word “whites” with “blacks,” and tweeted them out again. For example, Owens tweeted:
Owens was then suspended. Hilariously, Twitter then backtracked and admitted its mistake:
Twitter takes reports of violations of the Twitter Rules very seriously. After reviewing your account, it looks like we made an error. This was our mistake and we’ve apologized to the account owner for the error.
So, how exactly did Twitter make that error? Human complaints? Algorithms? We have no way of knowing. But suffice it to say that the double standard in social media just received another piece of bolstering evidence. As Owens stated, Jeong’s comments were “horrifically racist, but somehow we’ve gotten to a point in society where it’s OK to say the exact same thing about white people, and that’s problematic.”