Jack Dorsey is a coward.
That’s right: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is so afraid of having his liberal ideas challenged that he censors conservatives and libertarians. He does this while turning a blind eye to abuses by liberals on the social media site he runs.
We know Dorsey is a coward, thanks to a young lady named Kassy Dillon. Dillon is a beautiful, classy, conservative woman. She was also recently suspended from microblogging site Twitter without explanation. Her crime? She tweeted the exact tweet, verbatim, that “Ghostbusters” reboot star Leslie Jones tweeted.
Dillon’s aim was to expose the double standard that exists on Twitter where political conservatives are concerned. Liberals often whine that Twitter is “not doing enough” to combat “abuse.” This has been used to justify increasingly unfair practices that always result in banning conservatives while allowing liberals to remain on the site.
To a liberal, “abuse” and “harassment” are defined as anything they don’t like. Making fun of them is harassment. Criticizing them is harassment. Disagreeing with them is harassment. Twitter’s polices are so vague, its rules enforcement so slipshod, that it is impossible to know if any given tweet will get the user banned. Twitter also has a long history of banning without cause the popular (and valuable) Twitter accounts owned by conservatives – accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers that give their owners considerable influence and financial reach.
In other words, Twitter is not merely a privately owned website. It is a public marketplace. The moment Twitter started accepting money from the public to promote individual tweets and accounts, it became a business open to the public.
That raises the specter of bias in public accommodation, and brings us back to Kassy Dillon. As Lindsey Ellefson reports, “Last week, ‘Ghostbusters’ star Leslie Jones was inundated with racist comments on her Twitter account. The reports got a lot of traction and suddenly, professional provocateur and Breitbart superstar Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from the platform. He hadn’t threatened her …”
Yiannopoulous has been repeatedly accused of inciting harassment against Jones, but this is false. Yes, when a famous and popular Twitter user argues with another user, it prompts backlash from the popular user’s fans. I once made a less than flattering crack about movie director Kevin Smith’s contributions to a popular YouTube channel when Smith offered lackluster commentary on the movie “Star Wars.” Mr. Smith went to my profile, then to my website, then to my Instagram account, all to find a picture of me he could post to his Twitter in order to angrily denounce me. His fans, understandably, piled on. That was greater “incitement” than Yiannopoulous offered – yet he was blamed for things other people said. He was denied service on Twitter simply for winning an argument with Leslie Jones.
This was the topic of last week’s Technocracy, in which I pointed out that, technically, there’s no expectation of free speech on any privately owned social media site. The problem is that Twitter is not just a privately owned website. Unlike, say, this very website, a news site where commenters may or may not be free to post depending on adherence to comment guidelines, Twitter is now a market. When a site charges money to the public for access to various services (advertising, promotion of tweets, etc.) it cannot reserve the right to refuse service any more than a grocery store can refuse to serve blacks or a tow truck driver can, without inciting massive backlash, refuse to tow liberals.
Opening a business to the public creates the expectation of equal accommodation for all customers. In a world where refusing to bake a cake for a “gay” wedding will result in your business being fined and sued into bankruptcy, denying service to a customer on the basis of his or her political beliefs ought not be legal or acceptable. Yet that is precisely what happens on Twitter all the time, and Kassy Dillon’s experiment proves it.
“The case of Breitbart contributor Kassy Dillon is a strange one,” writes Ellefson. “The vile tweets aimed at her didn’t fall into the void, but she sort of did. She intended to defend Yiannopoulos by reposting some of Jones’ tweets … and got suspended.” Worse, the suspension (again, without explanation) came after Dillon complained about a slew of death and rape threats directed at her by liberals. “Man sends Kassy Dillon death threats,” wrote Twitter user Mark Dice. “Twitter does NOTHING, and SHE is suspended for complaining?” Yet that is precisely what happened. Dillon was banned for writing exactly what Leslie Jones wrote without consequences. Ms. Dillon was punished after complaining about the very type of harassment that Leslie Jones and Jack Dorsey used to justify permanently banning Milo Yiannopoulos.
Dillon had her Twitter account reinstated after the hashtag #FreeKassy caught fire on social media.
I have a Twitter account. For two years, I’ve been subjected to repeated harassing tweets, bizarrely sexual and obsessive messages, and constant third-party harassment by a Twitter user whom I’ve profiled in this column previously. Several users whose only crime was writing to this liberal user to disagree with him were banned after a single tweet. The harasser, who stalks my Twitter feed and harasses many of the people with whom I interact, retains his account despite multiple complaints. Twitter doesn’t even acknowledge my complaints anymore. Why is this so? Because my Internet stalker is a liberal and I am a conservative. On Twitter, I am guilty of a thoughtcrime, while anyone who harasses me can do no wrong.
Twitter will continue to unfairly purge conservatives from its marketplace, denying them public service. This will occur in a way that would get a Christian or conservative business sued and fined into bankruptcy if it showed similar bias to liberals. Twitter will ban other prominent conservatives for no reason. Twitter will ban me for calling Jack Dorsey a coward. Twitter will ban you for winning arguments with liberals. And when we turn to our Facebook pages to bemoan this unfair treatment, we’ll be censored there, too. There is nothing you and I can do about it as long as the major platforms in social media are run by the political left.
That’s because liberals hate free speech – and like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, all of them are wretched cowards.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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