With no warning and no explanation, Twitter banned conservative radio host, writer, and retired U.S. Marine Jesse Kelly. Not suspended, but outright banned.
Unlike Twitter’s ban of alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and Baked Alaska, there’s no plausible or previous factor to explain why Twitter would ban Kelly. He’s never engaged in the targeted harassment or hate speech that Twitter’s terms of service specifically forbids. Kelly told the Washington Examiner that he’s never been so much as temporarily blocked from posting, let alone suspended.
As always, it’s important to reiterate that Twitter is a private company. There is no intrinsic right to use it to express oneself. However, Twitter’s ban of Jesse Kelly epitomizes two major problems the company is creating not only for its users, but for itself.
First is the obvious quandary. The First Amendment, as a general guiding principle, works. Twitter is right to ban users who engage in incitement and threats, and other forms of targeted harassment. But why would Twitter attempt to rewrite the rules of acceptable speech, to the point that it would ban a mainstream figure as innocuous as Kelly? In doing this, Twitter is digging itself into the hole of effectively endorsing the voices that they do not ban.
And somewhere in there, as they begin to curate their content and ban people with perspectives they don’t like, they take on the risk of being viewed by the courts as publishers, and of becoming legally liable for what they allow to be published.
Moreover, consider that Kelly, a pundit and combat veteran, is deemed unacceptable by Twitter, whereas Louis Farrakhan and Richard Spencer, both enthusiastic and unabashed racists, are still on the site. That gives rise to a second and more important question: is Twitter trying to suppress hate and harassment, or is it trying to suppress political speech? And further: Was Jesse Kelly’s real crime the ideas he espoused, or his effectiveness in spreading them?
“We believe that everyone should have the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers,” Twitter’s rules page reads. “In order to protect the experience and safety of people who use Twitter, there are some limitations on the type of content and behavior that we allow.”
That’s a broad explanation for something that should be simple. But if you look closely at the details of Twitter’s terms of service, the company violated its own rules by offering Kelly no justification for their ban, failing to point out which tweet or which pattern of tweets qualified as “hateful conduct.”
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Twitter has banned Jesse Kelly — are they policing hate, or suppressing political ideas? https://t.co/69AQqnNDTw
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 26, 2018
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