Richmond Time Dispatch: Column: I Was Suspended from Twitter; I May Never Tweet Again
This article features Government Accountability Project whistleblower client, Steve Herman, and was originally published here.
I now have something in common with former President Donald Trump. Both of us were permanently suspended by Twitter. The circumstances were quite different.
Trump’s suspension, stemming from his rhetoric leading up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, took place under the previous Twitter ownership, and he has since been reinstated even though he was impeached by the House of Representatives for incitement of insurrection. My suspension last December resulted from tweeting about other journalists who were suspended from Twitter for tweeting about a banned account that shared the location of new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s private jet.
Musk subsequently tweeted the journalists’ accounts have been “restored.” That was misleading. In my case I would not be able to tweet to my 115,000 followers, view my timeline or see the accounts I follow unless I removed three tweets mentioning @ElonJet. I appealed and was informed my appeal was denied, putting me indefinitely in a deep level of Twitter purgatory. The only recourse I have, according to Twitter, is to withdraw my appeal and remove the offending tweets, which Musk inaccurately characterized as public dissemination of “assassination coordinates.”
None of the suspended journalists revealed Musk’s real time location. They...
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