When CEO Jack Dorsey appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February 2019, Joe brought up Alex Jones being banned and pointed out that Twitter was the last major platform to do so after (briefly) allowing him to keep his account in the wake of YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, etc, banning him. When Joe asked, “What did he do on your platform, that you all were in agreement that this is enough?” Jack responded, “Ah, I’m not — I’m not sure what the, what the actual like, ya know, violations were.”720 (That’s an exact quote.)
Alex was banned for telling off CNN’s Oliver Darcy outside of the Jack Dorsey congressional hearing in September 2018, where Jones denounced Oliver for pressuring all the social media companies to get him banned. The confrontation was broadcast live on Twitter via Periscope and so Twitter quickly banned Jones for “harassing” a supposed “journalist.”721
It’s important to point out that Oliver Darcy was working in the capacity of a journalist at the time, on public property, while he was covering an event about social media; thus confirming everything Alex Jones was saying about the censorship of conservatives. Oliver Darcy later admitted that CNN had “presented Twitter with examples of [violations of Twitter’s terms of service] available on both the InfoWars and Jones account.”722
In August 2019 a group of Leftists gathered outside Senator Mitch McConnell’s house after sunset to harass him and some of them made threatening statements saying he should be killed, and when he posted a short video on his Twitter account showing the angry mob and what they were saying, he was suspended and the video removed for allegedly violating their terms of service prohibiting making threats, even though he had just posted evidence of what people were doing to him!723 His staff appealed the suspension but the appeal was denied.724
Only after growing outrage and media coverage did Twitter lift his suspension and restore the video.725 Mitch McConnell is the Senate Majority Leader, the most powerful Senator in the country, yet was censored when he tried to show his fellow Americans that Leftists had surrounded his home to intimidate and threaten him.
Twitter Verification
The “verified” checkmark on someone’s social media account is a confirmation that the account actually belongs to that person, and isn’t being run by someone else pretending to be them. Public figures like celebrities and journalists usually get them to prevent imposter accounts from impersonating them, and having a verified account is often seen as a sign that someone is “important” and so every wannabe rapper and blogger wishes to get one, but you have to apply, and Twitter won’t just verify anyone’s account.
They have, however, verified numerous Black Lives Matter activists’ accounts whose credentials are basically that they’re anti-police trolls who spend their entire lives on Twitter spewing hatred of police and white people. Virulent racist troll Tariq Nasheed, who accuses almost every white person in America of being a “suspected white supremacist,” has been verified. Other Black Lives Matter trolls like Shaun King and Deray McKesson have also been rewarded with verified accounts.
Twitter also verified Sarah Jeong, a new editorial board member at the New York Times, despite a series of racist tweets about “dumbass fucking white people” and saying she gets “joy” out of being “cruel to old white men.”726 Twitter also verified loads of fringe LGBT social media personalities, and plenty of pro-feminist and pro-abortion trolls in order to give them more clout online.
Meanwhile, popular conservatives like James O’Keefe, Carpe Donktum, Gary Franchi, David Harris Jr., Brandon Tatum, David Horowitz, and others have been denied verification for years.727 Before they were permanently banned, Tommy Robinson, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos had been unverified.
Twitter released a statement saying “Reasons for removal [of verification checkmark] may reflect behaviors on and off Twitter that include: Promoting hate and/or violence against, or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease” and even, “Supporting organizations or individuals that promote the above.”728
Twitter verified the “Parkland kids,” a small group of anti-gun activists who became social media stars over night after a lunatic shot up their high school on Valentine’s Day 2018 in Parkland, Florida. One of them, David Hogg, went on to sic his nearly 500,000 followers onto the advertisers of various Fox News shows, harassing them to pull their ads from the network.729 Twitter even hosted the Parkland kids for a live Q&A to help them promote their “March For Our Lives” event where they demanded more gun control laws.730
Never Tweet
There’s a meme that looks like the sign-up page for Twitter but reads “Get fired from your job in ten years” just above the link to open an account, and it’s not that far from the truth. What you say in a tweet can be perfectly fine if it was just said amongst a group of friends, but often our enemies are lurking quietly on Twitter, watching and waiting for one little slip up, and even complete strangers who happen to come across your tweet may feel compelled to enact “revenge” because you said something on the Internet that offended them.
People often like to go digging through old tweets of their enemies, hoping to find years or decade-old tweets saying “racist,” “homophobic,” or “sexist” things so they can derail their career. Twitter’s search function allows people to search anyone’s Twitter feed for any keyword or phrase, making this tactic extremely simple. (I advise, if you use Twitter, to consider a “tweet delete” app which allows you to easily search for and delete old tweets which contain certain words or phrases. Or regularly delete your tweets that are older than six months in order to avoid past tweets posted years ago from coming back to haunt you.)
Oftentimes when someone becomes famous, people will go nosing around their old tweets typing in keywords like “nigger” and “faggot” into the search to see if they’ve ever tweeted anything with those words in the past so they can retweet them, trying to get the person in trouble. This is exactly what happened right after Kyler Murray won the 2018 Heisman Trophy. A reporter for USA Today took it upon himself to search through his past tweets and found some “homophobic” ones from when he was fifteen-years-old.731
When Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Josh Hader was chosen to pitch in the 2018 All-Star Game, people dug up some of his old tweets from when he was in high school and it made headlines because he used the “n-word” in a few tweets.732 He then apologized and deleted his entire account. The same thing has happened to “Mr. Beast,” a popular YouTuber, and singer Shawn Mendes.733
The best example of what can happen when you tweet is the disaster that occurred to a woman named Justine Sacco in 2013 who had just 170 followers. When boarding a flight to South Africa she tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” and then got on the plane without thinking anything of it. She didn’t say it as a racist insult about the AIDS epidemic there, but meant it as a sarcastic jab at Americans who she said lived in “a bit of a bubble when it comes to what’s going on in the third world,” since she herself was born in South Africa and returning there to visit family.734