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Twitter Thrills Far-Right Trolls by Silencing Left-Wing Voices - The Intercept
Nov 29, 2022 3 mins, 6 secs

Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.

All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.

In a phone interview on Monday, Loder, a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert, told The Intercept that their @chadloder account was initially suspended last week for about 90 minutes after Musk had replied to Ngo on Twitter.

After briefly regaining access to the account, Loder was suspended again and accused by Twitter of having used another account to evade the ban.

“What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder said.

Whatever the reason for the suspension, Loder said it’s clear that Twitter is “no longer a viable platform” for antifascist and security researchers.

Loder, who has shifted to Mastodon, said that for social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.” Now that Musk appears to be reworking content moderation to tilt the playing field in favor of far-right extremists, Loder added, Twitter “is going to turn into Gab with crypto scams.”.

“I also agree that Twitter shouldn’t have censored the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Loder said.

But, Loder said, the sweeping changes made by Musk, like the increased tolerance for far-right hate speech, mean that Twitter will probably keep functioning as a website and an app for some time, but be slowly hollowed out as a place to find varying views on matters of public importance, or a space for online organizing against far-right extremism.

On Mastodon, Singh shared screenshots of emails from Twitter, showing that while reports had been filed against their account for the same tweets that Ngo had posted as screenshots, the company concluded that none of those tweets violated official policies.

Last Friday, Twitter also suspended the account of CrimethInc, an anarchist collective and publisher.

In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended.

This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.

Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.

“Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with ‘free speech’ — it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence,” CrimethInc said in a statement sent to The Intercept

As the investigative journalist Steven Monacelli reported last week, two days after a gunman killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group in Texas that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ gatherings

Since its Twitter account was suspended last week, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club has been tweeting from a separate account, @elmforkJBGC, which has not yet been suspended

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