Twitter has kept its promise. In November, the company announced that beginning December 18, it would boot any accounts affiliated with hate groups, and right on schedule, what some members of the far right have dubbed the #Twitterpurge has begun.
At long last, Twitter has begun banning (some, not all) Nazis
Twitter’s new policy prohibiting users from being affiliated with hate groups is now in effect.
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Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
Given Twitter’s shaky track record on enforcing the policies it implements, many people were justifiably skeptical that any real effort to finally “ban the Nazis” — as the popular refrain goes — would actually come to pass. However, on Monday morning, Twitter suspended numerous accounts affiliated with extremist right-wing hate groups, targeting both individuals affiliated with such groups and accounts belonging to the organizations themselves.
The American Nazi Party’s account was suspended, as were the accounts belonging to Generation Identity, an extremist youth group, and Vanguard America, a white supremacist group that gained attention for its role in the white nationalist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. (James Fields, who was charged with first-degree murder after driving a car into a crowd of counter-protesters at that rally, killing one person and injuring several others, had attended it in affiliation with Vanguard America.)
Individuals removed as a result of the new policy include the neo-Nazi and leader of the National Socialist Movement Jeff Schoep, as well as Michael Hill, founder of the militant white supremacist group League of the South.
In an extremely significant move, Twitter also suspended two accounts belonging to Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, the leader and deputy leader of a right-wing British nationalist group called Britain First. Both Fransen and Golding were arrested last week over multiple charges concerning incitement of hate in Northern Ireland. But Fransen in particular is best known in the US for posting last month several extremely violent anti-Muslim propaganda videos, which were controversially retweeted by President Donald Trump. As a result of Fransen’s suspension, the tweets have now been removed from Trump’s timeline. Britain First’s official account has also been suspended.
Twitter’s “purge” is continuing, and hasn’t caught every prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist who uses the site in its net — nor is it guaranteed to do so. The account of Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Charlottesville rally and whose brief verification by Twitter in November ignited a firestorm of outrage, is currently still active. So is that of Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi who gained overnight prominence due to the far-right rallies he organized following Trump’s election, and Spencer’s subsequent Inauguration Day punching.
But although hateful voices still remain on the platform, it’s been a very good day for those who have spent most of 2017 pleading for Twitter to (please, finally, above all else) ban the Nazis.
