Nazis Got Me Kicked Off of Twitter
How the far right exploits the platform’s clueless approach to hate speech
Last Friday, I spent the evening worrying about what to do about a neo-Nazi internet campaign targeting me for physical violence. This is not the first time something like this has happened to me but the experience is always unnerving. I reached out to some friends and colleagues to brainstorm solutions and lost a bit of sleep.
When I woke up on Saturday, I found that my Twitter account was permanently suspended. As far as I could tell, individuals on the far-right had launched a campaign to mass report my account and got me kicked off the platform.
As a journalist, Twitter is a critical reporting tool for me, and over the course of the weekend I reached out to Twitter a handful of times trying to determine why, exactly, my account had been suspended and what, if anything, I could do to bring it back. Though my account was eventually reinstated, the experience reinforced my understanding of Twitter as a platform of opaque, contradictory, and inconsistent moderation processes.
In retaliation, far right activists, including a racist, misogynist gang called the Proud Boys, used the messaging app Telegram to…
