McConnell's campaign locked out by Twitter for posting critic's profanity-laced video

[Cathoholic]

McConnell’s campaign locked out by Twitter for posting critic’s profanity-laced video​

BENJAMIN TOBIN, PHILLIP M. BAILEY | LOUISVILLE COURIER JOURNAL

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign has been thrown in Twitter jail.

After sharing a video of a profanity-laced protest outside of the Kentucky Republican’s home in Louisville, the campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, has been locked out.

"This morning, Twitter locked our account for posting the video of real-world, violent threats made against Mitch McConnell. . . .

. . . "Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us,” Golden added. “We appealed and Twitter stood by their decision . . .

. . . . On Monday, Black Lives Matter Louisville leader Chanelle Helm said in a live video of the protest outside of McConnell’s Highlands-area home that instead of falling and injuring his shoulder over the weekend, the GOP leader “should have broken his little raggedy, wrinkled-(expletive) neck.”

After a man makes a reference to a hypothetical McConnell voodoo doll, Helm replied, "Just stab . . .

McConnell's campaign locked out by Twitter for posting critic's profanity-laced video

After sharing a video of a profanity-laced protest outside of McConnell's home in Louisville, the campaign's Twitter account has been locked out.

www.courier-journal.com

 

[Dr_Meinheimer]

A lot on here like to paint the right as being angry and violent, but any time I see a politician harassed or accosted it is a Republican politician. Why is that? Classless people, like the people outside McConnell’s house. Get a life.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us,”

Isn’t “massacre” here being used to attribute recent events to McConnell for disallowing proposals for gun regulation and not being used as a threat?

Edit: I looked at the tweets. That largely appears to be the case for the ones I saw.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1159236288542904321

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Twitter freezes McConnell campaign account for posting video of protester’s violent threats​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...8a37e6-b95e-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

Twitter locked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign account from further activity Wednesday as punishment for its sharing of a video of protesters screaming obscenities outside the Kentucky Republican’s home.

The social media company will not unlock @TeamMitch unless it agrees to remove the video.

McConnell’s campaign confirmed to The Washington Post that its account was suspended. The Courier-Journal first reported the story.

“This morning, Twitter locked our account for posting the video of real-world, violent threats made against Mitch McConnell. This is a problem with the speech police in America today,” Kevin Golden, McConnell’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

The video shows a group of protesters gathered outside McConnell’s Louisville home on Monday. A woman, identifed by the Courier-Journal as Black Lives Matter Louisville leader Chanelle Helm, is heard on the video mocking McConnell’s recent shoulder injury and saying he “should have broken his little, raggedy, wrinkled-a-- neck.”

She then yells, “Just stab the m----- f----- in the heart, please.” Someone also yells, “Die!”

Golden criticized Twitter for having contradictory standards.

“Twitter will allow the words of ‘Massacre Mitch’ to trend nationally on their platform, but locks our account for posting actual threats against us,” Golden added. “We appealed and Twitter stood by their decision, saying our account will remain locked until we delete the video.”

In the wake of two back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend, the hashtag “#MassacreMitch” name caught fire on Twitter with critics blaming McConnell for blocking stricter gun laws.

 

[Jeanne_S]

What vile people and twitter clearly endorses this behavior by trying to suppress it.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

I don’t want to be seen to be defending the Democrats or their supporters, but generally the violence I see right-wing Americans defend on here is state violence. Stuff like someone swearing at a politician horrifies them, but a man being deported or a cop beating someone up is more likely to be shrugged off or viewed as legitimate.

 

[ProVobis]

Not a good move by twitter IMO. It can only fire up his base further.

Case is NOT closed. Mitch is certain to bring up the issue and Trump is certain to defend him.

 

[Ridgerunner]

It’s too bad, but entirely expectable. The left is totalitarian to the core. We’re one election away from being unable to express anything but the leftist line without interference or prosecution.

 

[Rockoh22]

How fake news is made.

 

[Cathoholic]

ProVobis . . .

Not a good move by twitter IMO. It can only fire up his base further.

Why politicize this (“It can only fire up his base further.”)??

Why not just say it is a bad move by Twitter because it was the wrong thing to do?

 

[Cathoholic]

Ridgerunner . . . .

The left is totalitarian to the core.

Insightful.

It is going to be very difficult on good people when the left gets the degree of power that they want.

 

[Rockoh22]

The left is totalitarian to the core.

Well I say it is the Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Vox, Buzzfeed group.

You remove them, you actually have a lot of reasonable Democrats willing to have a conversation. What I mean it is that social media has brought good in us, but also the worst in us.

The right has its own loons also, but people call them out. The left? What is the limit? That is the problem.

 

[Ridgerunner]

You remove them, you actually have a lot of reasonable Democrats willing to have a conversation

One truly can wonder sometimes whether the Dem party controls the liberal media or whether it’s the other way around. When, as now, the far left Dems who are the media darlings, seem to dominate the less radical Dems, one really does wonder.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Just a reminder, it is possible to make share public statements without Twitter. They don’t have total control over the ability of someone to share an expression.

 

[Cathoholic]

ThinkingSapien . . . .

They don’t have total control over the ability of someone to share an expression.

You are right TS. They don’t have “total control”. (But then again; I don’t know anybody who says they do.)

But they have enough “control”, where they should have been “anti-trusted” a long time ago.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

But they have enough “control”, where they should have been “anti-trusted” a long time ago.

They have an estimated 6% of social media market share. Man, that’s huge.

 

[Cathoholic]

Man, that’s huge.

That ignores their niche. (But even if you lumped all social media together, this is significant power.)

To the readers here. TS will implicitly pretend that Twitter is a small company by emphasizing the 6% number above.

Don’t be fooled by this. They need to be anti-trusted. (At least that is my opinion.)

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day,[17]and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day.[18][19][20] In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”.[21][22] As of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.[10] Since 2015 Twitter has been a hotbed of debates and news covering politics of the United States. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter was the largest source of breaking news on the day, with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) that day.[23]

Twitter - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

They are huge and to implicitly deny this is not fully forthright.

They also own other companies.

Top 5 Companies Owned by X. Corp (Formally Twitter, Inc.)

Twitter (now X) acquired a few technology companies, making it one of the world's most popular social media platforms. Here are five of those companies.

www.investopedia.com

They are also used extensively by other companies.

https://www.umassd.edu/cmr/social-media-research/2018-fortune-500/

As I said, they need to be anti-trusted.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

That ignores their niche.

That’s actually been a challenge in examining the operations of various online companies; defining the market in which they operate. For almost any given online company a market can be defined for it such that it is the only entity that fits that niche. But at the same time they may be competing with entities that are outside of that defined niche.

From a recent report.

P(name removed by moderator)ointing the locus of competition and therefore the relevant market in which technology platforms compete can also be challenging because the markets are multisided and are often ones with which economists and lawyers have little experience[…] This complexity can make market definition another hurdle to effective enforcement.

Current antitrust laws also look at the effects that an entity has on market prices. Users don’t pay anything to use these services. As far as financial transactions go they could be said to be in the advertising market where the advertisers are the customers that are paying. But even with the market defined that way they are not one of the larger players.

Thus far no “relevant market” has been defined. Not is it an “essential facility.”

They also own other companies.

I’m not sure what the take away is from this. Their competition also owns other companies. That appears to be par for the course.

 

[Cathoholic]

ThinkingSapien . . . .

Users don’t pay anything to use these services.

Why not add in the whole story TS?

Why just PART of that cost?

Why not just say in your post how taxpayers are forced to pay for Twitter via tax subsidies irrespective of “use”?

And at least part of the reason Twitter can obtain those monies is via their urging (some would say “manipulation”) of legislative bodies.

You know these things.

Why the silence on these dimensions?

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Why not just say in your post how taxpayers are forced to pay for Twitter via tax subsidies irrespective of “use”?

Impacts on consumer prices is a factor in antitrust laws and thus relevant. If you know of how tax exemptions interact with antitrust laws feel free to share. If there are not any then it is not relevant. I don’t know of any, so I won’t ever bring up tax deals and exemptions in such a discussion.

But for now, whether there is agreement or disagreement with the decision, this is an instance of a private company selecting what messages can persist on their systems. That’s protected by the First Amendment.