‘A great purge?’: Twitter suspends Richard Spencer, other prominent alt-right accounts

From: Washington Post

Ever since alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos sent actress Leslie Jones a string of tweets insulting the comedian’s race and intelligence, Twitter has made banning abusive accounts a priority.

At the time, the company offered a statement, which read in part:

. . . our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others . . . we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.

We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders

Recently Twitter suspended more accounts associated with the alt-right, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”

Included among them was the verified account of Richard Spencer, whom The Washington Post described as a leader of the alt-right and “one of the most media-savvy thinkers in the movement.”

Twitter also suspended the account of the Virginia-based National Policy Institute, an alt-right white nationalist think tank of which Spencer is the president, and that of Radix Journal, a magazine run by Spencer.

Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers also had their accounts suspended.

In response, Spencer posted a video to YouTube in which he said, “I am alive physically, but digitally speaking, there has been execution squads across the alt-right.”

“It’s corporate Stalinism, in the sense that there is a great purge going on, and they’re purging people on the basis of their views,” Spencer said.

He said these suspensions are unlike Yiannopoulos’s.

“I supported people like Milo when they were banned from Twitter, but Milo was engaging in something that could be called ‘harassment,’” Spencer said of the man who used the platform to call Jones “barely literate,” “fat and ugly, ugly, ugly, fat” and “a hot black dude.”

Added Spencer, “Again, I totally think he should have stayed.”

Spencer, though, drew a sharp distinction between the way Yiannopoulos used the platform and the way he did.

“I and a number of other people who just got banned were not even trolling,” he said. “I was using Twitter just like I always used Twitter: to give people some updates and maybe comment on a news story here and there.”

Instead, Spencer said he thinks this was a “coordinated effort to just wipe out alt-right Twitter” in response to arguments that social media helped elect Donald Trump.