The graphics below are self-explanatory. For years Twitter allowed Donald Trump to incite racial hatred, misogyny and and all kinds of bigotry on its platforms. It allowed him to applaud naked police brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters, to promote hatred against Palestinians and applaud Israeli terrorism and genocidal policies against them. It allowed him to advocate and boast about torturing people. It even allowed him to openly threaten nuclear war, against Iran and North Korea, on its platforms.
So Twitter has not and never had any problem with extreme forms of violence and state criminality. It only developed a ‘problem’ with this very recently, when it began to suspect that its prize Presidential attraction was a loser. Only after his November electoral defeat did it start regularly putting warnings on his posts about the flagrant lies within them.
Twitter’s corporate owners made billions of dollars from Trumpism. Indeed they helped bring him, undoubtedly the vilest and most dangerous political figure in the politics of advanced countries since Adolf Hitler, to power. They, along with Facebook, through the simple method of lucrative paid advertising, also helped bring extreme right wing forces around Boris Johnson to power in Britain via Brexit, promoting racism and bigotry on an industrial scale.
The result is to be seen in the terrible death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic, where Britain and the US are among the deadliest Covid-ridden places to live in the world thanks to the far right thugs and killers the corporate social media giants helped bring to power.
That is why they allowed him to rampage unrestricted for many years. But Twitter also repeatedly banned and suspended anti-racists and socialists, whose right to free speech was never upheld on Twitter. Big money allows scum like Trump to turn the democratic potential of IT technology and social media into a tool for the mass incitement of racist murder and genocide. Which is why it is an imperative demand of the labour movement for social media such as Twitter and Facebook to be placed under democratic workers control, so fascists and anti-democratic, genocidal forces can be excluded while working-class, anti-racist forces can freely debate.
Twitter are stumped as the graphics below relate. A comrade from the Trotskyist Faction, while Trump’s forces were preparing, and then carrying out, the assault on the Capitol, pointed out repeatedly that Trump’s forces were fascist terrorists and tweeted to prominent opponents of Trump, including President-Elect Joe Biden, that these fascist terrorists should be shot. He also made the obvious comparison between Trump’s putsch and Hitler/Ludendorff’s 1923 Beer-Hall putsch in Munich, and demanded that Trump should be executed for this, noting that Hitler and Lundendorff should have been executed after Munich. It is obvious, to say the least, that if Hitler had been killed then it is likely that many millions of victims of his subsequent genocide would never have died.
Our comrade’s account was suspended on the grounds of ‘hateful conduct’. According to these imbeciles, by callling Trump’s people ‘fascist terrorists’ he had offended against the rule that : “You may not promote violence against, threaten or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious illness”.
The comrade appealed and challenged the Twitter liars to “Explain what ‘protected characteristic’ I attacked. Trump is a fascist terrorist. That is not a protected characteristic.”
They cannot reply, as it is laughable and criminally insulting to in any way equate hostility to fascist terrorism with racism, national hatred, homophobia, transphobic, ageism or anti-disabled bigotry.
In fact in censoring the demand for fascist terrorists to be treated as fascist terrorists, Twitter are defending the perpetrators of such vile bigotry in spades.
Twitter’s corporate leaders are Trump supporters, who have made a mint from Trump’s rantings. They have belatedly backed off from Trump now he is shown up to be a loser.
Our comrade’s appeal against suspension and the deletion of these Tweets is stuck, as Twitter cannot deal with the appeal. Because Twitter’s corporate executives, including its CEO Jack Dorsey, supported Trump for years. If they uphold our comrade’s appeal, they are upholding the right of left-wing militants to call for fascist terrorists to be shot. In fact the implication of the suspension is that calling Trump’s supporters ‘terrorists’ is in some way ‘hateful conduct’. But they have a big problem with this, as Joe Biden himself rightly called them terrorists.
And if they are terrorists, the question of whether they should or should not be shot is obviously a legitimate question of debate. They are hoist on their own petard, as Trump himself, on their platform, Tweeted about killing people he considered to be ‘terrorists’ without any objection from Twitter.
On the other hand, if they reject the appeal, they are clearly defending the perpetrators of the attack on the Capitol, who murdered people including a Capitol policeman, from pungent attack.
So Trump-promoting, Trump-supporting Twitter are sitting on this appeal like pathetic cowards. Normally such appeals are dismissed with the blink of an eye. Four days now since Trump’s fascist putsch and counting…
