Well, my suspension from Twitter for featuring art from the cover of my book about the radical Right in my profile photo has now reached its eighth day, and there’s still no end in sight.
I have been corresponding with a spokesperson at the company, though those discussions have had long periods of radio silence from their end. Most recently, I was assured that they would attempt to set up conversations between key staff members and me, but that’s been followed by continuing silence. So we’ll see what happens.
I really am refusing to back down on this as a matter of principle. We have already had too many other researchers of the far Right victimized by Twitter’s insanely obtuse algorithm, which clearly is unable to distinguish hateful content from the journalism that exposes hateful activity, including the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael Edison Hayden. It’s outrageous that the people most at risk from Twitter’s new initiative cracking down on radical right-wing content are the journalists working to expose the groups that promulgate the hate that Twitter wants deleted.
It’s not just Twitter, though. Far Right researcher/author Shane Burley, with whom I have worked covering the riots in Portland of the past two years, has been suspended by Facebook for very similar reasons. “This month it was for posting a meme that said ‘The Original Straight Pride Parade’ with a photo from a 1920s Klan rally,” he told me. “I only had my account back for two weeks after it had another 30-day suspension, that time for posting a photo of David Duke's Klan Border Watch with a message about how we should remember the past. It was right about the time of the border militia controversy.”
What really is interesting about the situation, though, is the stark contrast between my case and what’s been happening when leading far-right figures have been suspended for actually promulgating hate.
I have been getting lots of support from a lot of quarters, for which I am deeply grateful. (And yes, I have also been inundated with lots of laughing Schadenfreude-laden missives from the goons of the far Right.) Yet at the same time, there hasn’t yet been any of the organized outrage of the kind in which the American Right specializes. The Left doesn’t have the kind of Outrage Machine the Right possesses.
Melissa Ryan pointed this out in her weekly Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter, posted at Hope Not Hate:
If David were a far-right personality, his plight would be trending on Twitter. Every far-right online community would be posting, meme-ing, brigading and galvanizing support on his behalf. Trolls would harass anyone who dared suggest Twitter had done the right thing suspending his account. A GoFundMe page would be set up on David’s behalf. Fox News would cover the story, possibly in prime time. Elected officials would cite this as another example of how tech platforms are biased against the right. They’d send fundraising emails about it and demand answers from tech executives during hearings. Trump Jr. would absolutely tweet about David and potentially so would Junior’s Dad.
If David were a far-right personality, Twitter would be on the defensive for months. Nothing the company said or did would placate the right, but Twitter would still bend over backwards to appease them.
Over at Rantt, Nancy Levine penned a thorough takedown of Twitter’s behavior in all this. As she notes, Twitter is supposed to be cracking down on hate-group activity on its website—and yet its leading response so far has been to ban one of the nation’s top researchers on far-right extremism because they deemed his book cover “hateful content.”
As Levine puts it: “If we hope to eradicate our country’s most dire ills, Twitter’s ‘health initiative’ will need to provide real remedies, not just platitudes.”
Levine also obtained a statement from my publisher, Verso Books:
“David Neiwert is one of the leading experts on the rise of far right movements in the U.S., and we are proud publishers of his book. Our decision to feature KKK hoods on the cover of Alt-America reflects the long history of white supremacy and right-wing movements in our country, which David reports on in critical detail. His work is vital to understanding and challenging the far-right, and Twitter should be able to distinguish between harmful hate speech and anti-extremist journalism and restore his account immediately.”
I will keep everyone posted as this progresses. Thanks for your support: Every tweet to @jack helps.