Twitter has suspended Steven Crowder for violating its “hateful conduct” terms, after he and his studio team posted an edited video of undercover reporter “SvenComputer” crashing a panel on “gender fluidity” at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
Initially, Twitter only suspended Crowder for 12 hours, but has since reversed that time limit, leaving Crowder in “Twitter jail” for at least a week over a video that was restricted not for its offensive language, which was immediately edited, but, Crowder believes, for content “offensive” to Twitter’s social justice-oriented censorship team.
According to the team at Louder With Crowder, SvenComputer infiltrated the “gender fluid” panel and filmed himself asking questions designed to shock the social justice panel. The video is provocative (and hilarious), but initially had the slur “f*****,” left un-bleeped. When Steven shared the video, he was immediately and unceremoniously locked in Twitter jail for a full 12 hours.
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The Crowder team immediately realized that there was content that should have been censored in the video, pulled the video from YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, soft-bleeped the slur, and then posted the edited video to all of their social networks.
That should have solved the problem — after all, the only truly offensive content was gone. But, it seems, Twitter didn’t believe that just the slur was offensive. It believed the entire video was offensive, as evidenced by the fact that NotGayJared, the first to share the edited video, soon met with a similar fate as Steven Crowder.
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It’s even clear from his tweet that NotGayJared isn’t posting the same video as before. The links are changed and he mentions directly that the “video is back up.” Twitter could have simply clicked through the link, realized the video had been edited properly, and left Jared’s tweet up.
But they didn’t.
And then, somehow, according to the Crowder team, it got worse. According to their version of the story (which is the only version we know, since Twitter has yet to respond to a request for comment), the Crowder team placed the new video in a series of sponsored tweets. Once Twitter realized they were trying to use SvenComputer’s stunt for promotion, the reaction was swift and merciless.
Crowder’s main account is now “limited” for a full seven days.
For an edited video.
And SvenComputer’s account has been locked.
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Crowder’s team was quick to point out that an account spreading clearly false information about the radio host and friend to the Daily Wire, is still up — and that false information, which paints Steven as a racist and member of a white supremacist movement, is still accessible even though the doctored photos and fake accounts are obvious fakes and potentially defamatory.
We will keep you updated as the situation progresses.
*Ed note: Earlier, we updated the story to say that Crowder’s Twitter was back up. It is not. The account appears to be active, but Steven and his team cannot access it, as Twitter has severely limited their control. We will update further if we hear from Crowder himself!