Tim ‘Apple’ Cook tells students to #LearnToCode… Twitter users demand he be banned for hate speech

The tech giant’s CEO, Cook, whom President Trump called his ‘good friend Tim Apple’, said all American kids should ‘learn to code’ – prompting sarcastic demands he be deplatformed, like others who have tweeted the dreaded hashtag.

“It should be a requirement in the US for every kid to have coding before they graduate from K12 and become somewhat proficient at it,” Cook said, pointing out that Apple was founded by a college dropout and that the company needs skilled coders much more than it needs college degrees.

But a Twitter spokesperson announced it was company policy to suspend users tweeting #LearnToCode back in January. While they subsequently backed away from the statement, several conservative-leaning Twitter users – including the editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller – were suspended for tweeting #LearnToCode at laid-off journalists last month.

So why was Cook’s account still up, many wondered?

Twitter’s legal policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, attempted to justify the suspensions during an appearance on the Joe Rogan show on Tuesday, describing #LearnToCode as “coded language that we’ve seen to mean death to journalists.”

“We were worried that #learntocode was taking on a different meaning” because it sometimes appeared next to more violent-sounding hashtags like #dayoftherope, she said. But clearly, Cook was threatening violence against those poor kids, and had to be stopped.

Adding to the farcical nature of the proceedings, Trump inadvertently renamed the exec “Tim Apple.”

(but of course, there was a perfectly good reason)

Twitter erupted in humorous possibilities,

…though some wondered why Cook didn’t correct him.