Elon Musk appears to have out-sourced decisions about who to ban from Twitter to the platform’s right-wing extremists.
By Robert Mackey & Micah Lee, November 19, 2022
Elon Musk claims to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform.
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.
As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.
