On Wednesday, according to BuzzFeed, Twitter announced that they would not ban anti-Semite par excellence Louis Farrakhan from their platform despite Farrakhan’s equating Jews to termites on Twitter.
Buzzfeed reported:
Twitter did remove Farrakhan’s verification checkmark after he tweeted, “Thoroughly and completely unmasking the Satanic Jew and the Synagogue of Satan.” But the insect comparisons were still okay under Twitter’s rules, despite the site’s proposed policies regarding “dehumanizing” tweets.
Just three weeks ago, Twitter announced that “non-targeted dehumanizing speech” would be banned from the platform — and explained that an example of such speech would be, “Statements along the lines of ‘All members of protected group X are dogs or rats or whatever.’”
According to the company, those rules have not yet taken effect.
Still, conservatives have been banned from Twitter for unspecified reasons. GayPatriot, a popular conservative account run by Bruce Carroll, was banned from Twitter this week. He wasn’t given a reason; instead, he was sent the following missive:
Carroll was originally suspended for calling convicted traitor Chelsea Manning a traitor, and for calling Chelsea Manning by his original name, Bradley. Presumably, his failure to remove those tweets led to his permanent ban.
Twitter’s failure to evenly enforce its rules has been a significant public relations issue for the company — widespread perception remains that Twitter is willing to let anti-Semitism and violent language from Left-leaning sources go while targeting it from those perceived to be on the Right. Back in August, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged as much, stating, “We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning. And I think it’s important to articulate our own bias and to share it with people so that people understand us. But we need to remove our bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement.”
In fact, last month, Dorsey admitted that the company leans so far to the left that conservatives “don’t feel safe to express their opinions” within the company. Dorsey said:
We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company. They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.
The vagaries of free speech on outlets like Twitter are obvious and troubling. But if Twitter is going to start tossing people for hateful or degrading speech, Farrakhan should be the first to go. And if they’re not, then a bevy of former Twitter stars should be allowed back on the platform. If Farrakhan is the outer limit on Twitter, pretty much everyone should be within that limit. The fact that Farrakhan remains while far more anodyne conservatives have been purged speaks to the continuing Leftist romance with the brutal anti-Semite and racist.