Twitter is again Censoring our work on the claim that White Supremacists are behind so many mass public shootings
Are we not allowed to point out that recent mass public shooters are environmentalists and socialists?
In 2019, Twitter closed down both the CPRC and John Lott’s accounts because they didn’t want mass public shooters in El Paso and New Zealand identified as anything but right-wing white supremacists. Now on August 14th, 2021, Twitter is again blocking any clarification of the claim that “White Supremacists killed more Americans than Muslim Extremists in recent years.” As noted in the picture at the top of this post, Lott tried to Tweet out that they might accurately refer to these murderers as environmentalists or socialists as white supremacists, but Twitter would not allow it. The CPRC research shows that just about 8% of mass public shooters have any link to being white supremacists.
The earlier account lockdowns prevented the same information from getting out. In July 2019, Lott wrote in the New York Daily News:
Twitter has locked my account. I can’t post anything or read messages from other users. The reason? In March, I tweetedthat the perpetrator of the New Zealand mosque shooting was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.” I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States.
What I tweeted was entirely accurate, and Twitter hasn’t bothered to provide me with an explanation for why they locked my account, but they have made clear that it was this tweet that supposedly violated their terms. . . .
John R. Lott, Jr., “Punished for tweeting the truth,” New York Daily News, July 9, 2019.
In August 2019, he wrote in the New York Daily News about Twitter locking down
I am the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, whose account Twitter locked because it tweeted a link to a Daily News article that I wrote about Twitter locking my personal account. Twitter informs me that the account was locked because the News article contains quotes from the New Zealand mass killer, and New Zealand and Australia have laws against sharing the manifestos of shooters.
As a Twitter representative emailed me: “Due to the safety of Twitter users and regulations abroad, Twitter does not allow linking to content that includes excerpts of manifestos of mass shooters.” Earlier automated responses from Twitter had offered no such information, with the explanation field left blank. I was able to use a connection to ask what was happening, but other victims of Twitter’s censorship may not even get an explanation.
The explanation seems simple enough, but there is a problem. Lots of other accounts have tweeted a link to that same News piece, including the New York Daily News itself to its over 700,000 followers. More than 80 other accounts retweeted the link, some with many more followers than the CPRC. But none of these other accounts have been locked or had posts removed for linking to the article. . . .
John R. Lott, Jr., “The Social Media Site’s Arbitrary Policies Allow Foreign Nations To Censor American — Often Without Explanation,” New York Daily News, August 16, 2019.
The post Twitter is again Censoring our work on the claim that White Supremacists are behind so many mass public shootings appeared first on Crime Prevention Research Center.
