BREAKING NEWS: Neo-Nazis and Other White Supremacists Launch Massive Nationwide Campaign to Leverage Elon Musk’s Ownership of Twitter to Deplatform the American Left
It turns out “freedom of speech” had nothing to do with far-right celebrations of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. While we already knew this, it’s terrifying to see how fast the far right is moving.
{Update at 7:31PM ET: Activist Chad Loder, who appears on the neo-Nazis’ proposed ban list and is referenced in the report below, has now been permanently suspended from Twitter by Elon Musk.}
As Huffington Post front-page senior editor Philip Lewis just noted here—and as has been discussed, in the last few hours, all over the internet—a list of thousands of left-leaning individuals the far right wants Twitter CEO Elon Musk to ban (and who it believes it can successfully convince him to ban via a fraudulent nationwide flagging-and-reporting campaign) is making the rounds among American neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.
Emboldened by recent false claims by Musk that the American left has never faced suspensions or permabans from Twitter (incredibly, Chad Loder, a Twitter user who pointed out the falsehood of such claims by Musk, was soon thereafter temporarily banned from the platform) these bigots have better reason than ever before to believe Musk will act on their false flags and false reports and dramatically winnow the ranks of left-wing activists speaking and organizing on Twitter. Meanwhile, the effort gives the lie—as if anyone but Musk ever facially credited it to begin with—that the far right wanted content-moderation changes to Twitter in the interest of “free speech.”
What’s most stunning about the list, however, is how unabashedly farcical it is.