Multiple reports claim that Twitter is mass banning right wing anonymous accounts.
Jack Hadfield at National File reported that “a mass ban occurred of mostly anonymous right wing Twitter accounts, with many of them being connected to the America First sphere of Twitter, including American Populist Union’s Vince Dao, and the news outlet Media Right News.”
Hadfield added, “Many of those users informed National File that they were banned for allegedly violating Twitter rules regarding ‘platform manipulation and spam.'”
Breitbart News’ Allum Bokhari also claimed Twitter is banning a number of right wing anon accounts.
He shared his information to Twitter writing, “New Twitter leadership appears to be purging right wing anon accounts.”
He added, “No pretext could ban all of these accounts at the same time. Some kind of new banning algorithm has been deployed, probably using network analysis to suppress an entire cluster at once.”
He then shared screenshots of four accounts, who all had over 9,000 followers, that had been suspended by Twitter.
In a subsequent tweet, he stated, “Sources reporting that accounts they’ve never even tweeted from have been banned. Suggests this purge is based on who you follow, not what you’ve tweeted.”
He then reiterated, “Censorship via network analysis. Wrote about this at length in DELETED — it’s how they suppress whole movements at once.”
Gab CEO Andrew Torba speculated that Twitter was targeting individuals via their IP and Device IDs.
He wrote on Gab, “Here’s the thing. If you were purged from Twitter tonight they have your IP and Device IDs stored, so even if you go back they will quickly ban you again.”
Torba did come to the same conclusion as Bokhari that they were targeting an entire network node. He explained, “This was about taking out an entire network node of people at once. They have that network node mapped and saved to prevent it from building back up. ”
Torba then encouraged those who were banned from Twitter to stay and remain on Gab rather than rejoin Twitter.
He wrote, “Instead of going back and getting banned again, stay here and build. We can’t afford what happened today to happen again during an election season. You’re not influencing the inner city liberals on Twitter, but with Gab you can build real community and get access to information you would never ever find on Twitter.”
Related: Twitter Bans YouTuber Heel vs Babyface For Game Of Thrones Quote
As for why the Twitter purge happened Bokhari theorized, “New CEO obviously wants to gain status with the media, so he’s letting the censors at Trust & Safety run wild.”
He then shared a tweet from November 29th that he wrote. It reads, “Wanting Mark Zuckerberg to step down = just as delusional as welcoming Jack Dorsey stepping down. The replacement will always be worse.”
Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal did an interview with MIT Technology Review in November 2020, where he was asked, “You’re caught in a bit of a hard place as somebody in the audience is also pointing out, that you’re trying to combat misinformation, you also want to protect free speech as a core value, and also in the U.S. as the first amendment. How do you balance those two?”
Agrawal responded, “Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”
“The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak,” he explained.
Related: Twitter Faces Lawsuit Over Failure To Remove Child Porn From Platform
Agrawal continued, “Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention.”
And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory,” he concluded.
What do you make of these new reports about Twitter mass banning right wing accounts? Were you banned?