The Republican Party has halted advertising on Twitter after the campaign account of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was locked for quoting death threats made against him. It is unclear if this will change Twitter’s mind.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) announced on Thursday that it would not spend any money on Twitter ad buys until the situation is “adequately addressed,” pointing out that McConnell’s campaign account was locked for tweeting a video of a protester threatening to stab the Senate majority leader, while allowing the hashtag #MassacreMitch to trend unmolested.
“We will not spend our resources on a platform that silences conservatives,” said NRSC spokesman Jesse Hunt.
The GOP and Trump’s re-election campaign followed suit, saying they would halt all planned ad spending until Twitter addresses the “disgusting bias.”
McConnell’s campaign account, Team Mitch, had posted a snippet from a Facebook Live video of a protest outside the leader’s house in Louisville, Kentucky on Monday, in which one person – later identified as a Black Lives Matter activist – wishes for someone to stab the senator.
On Wednesday, social media platforms went on a banning spree, removing the original video stream and locking or banning people who shared it – from journalists to McConnell’s campaign account.
Also on rt.com Truth against the rules? Twitter censors videos of protesters threatening to KILL Mitch McConnellTwitter has said in a statement that it does not allow the sharing of violent threats on its platform regardless of the context. The company is standing by the decision to lock the account and has rejected the campaign’s appeal. McConnell’s campaign manager Kevin Golden says that amounts to hypocrisy.
“Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us,” he said. “The Lexington Herald-Leader can attack Mitch with cartoon tombstones of his opponents. But we can’t mock it."
This is a problem with the speech police in America today.
“This is unbelievable even for Twitter,” said Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), calling for people to sign his petition “to tell Big Tech to stop censoring speech.” Cruz has recently held hearings about Google’s censorship and its possible influence on elections.
Meanwhile, the White House is teasing the existence of an upcoming executive order that would do something to address social media censorship – but would not say what it contains.
“If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,” Politico quoted one White House official, who remained anonymous.
Will Chamberlain, publisher of the conservative magazine Human Events, wondered if the GOP response is going far enough. Halting ad spending would be adequate if the Republicans were“some random corporation,” he tweeted, but the Senate majority should instead introduce a bill proposed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), that would remove immunity from tech platforms that engage in censorship.
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