Twitter’s stock dropped by 12 percent on Monday following its decision last week to ban President Donald Trump’s personal account and its subsequent draconian crackdown on conservative content.
Monday was the first trading day since the company declared on Friday it was permanently banning President Trump from its service, HNGN noted. When the market opened on Monday, Twitter shares dropped to $45.17, though they had closed on Friday at $51.48 a share. According to the Daily Wire, the social-media platform, at its lowest evaluation, suffered a $5 billion loss.
In the immediate aftermath of the largely peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol building last week, Twitter claimed President Trump’s Twitter account posed a risk of “further incitement of violence.”
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in a statement. “In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.”
Of course, Twitter made no such efforts to crack down on any of the Twitter accounts of Democrats such as Senator Kamala Harris, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative Maxine Waters, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or ex-NFL player Colin Kapernick, all of whom applauded and encouraged the Antifa/BLM violence last summer. So-called “comedian” Kathy Griffin tweeted out a photo of herself holding a decapitated head intended to look like that of President Trump. She is still on Twitter.
And as noted by Voice of America, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei of Iran continues to enjoy virtually unfettered access to the media giant, despite his account’s frequent anti-Semitic, anti-Israel tweets and Iran’s ban against Twitter for ordinary citizens. Twitter executives even refused Israel’s request to remove tweets from Ayatollah Khamenei last July that called for a genocide of the Israeli people, while simultaneously slapping warnings on President Trump’s tweets pertaining to mail-in ballots and the George Floyd riots at the time. But the one post from the Ayatollah that Twitter took swift action against was a recent one questioning the trustworthiness of the COVID-19 vaccines. “It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations. Given our experience France’s HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either,” he tweeted. A spokesman for Twitter told the New York Post the tweet was in violation of the company’s rules against coronavirus misinformation. It’s okay to call for genocide, but don’t dare question anything involving the COVID narrative.
And yet, the American people are supposed to believe that Twitter’s actions are NOT politically motivated?
Even left-wing Slate.com questioned why President Trump’s account would be banned while the Chinese embassy was allowed to continue using the platform to tweet controversial claims such as ones claiming the Uighur women in the country’s Xinjiang region were “liberated” by the Chinese government’s policies and were no longer “baby-making machines.” In these cases, Twitter removes the tweets, but allows the accounts to remain.
Other tweets that have somehow failed to meet Twitter’s “glorification of violence” standard, according to The Federalist, include one from user @ Axlbarnes that read, “Republicans deserve to die!! Make the guillotine red again!!” Another tweet, from user @BraatzMichael, read, “I love that all the women that ted bundy killed were white women they deserved it just like all white women deserve to die.”
President Trump responded to the account ban by criticizing the social-media giant for its censorship and collusion with the Democrats. “As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the President tweeted using his government account @POTUS. Of course, that tweet was also deleted and suspended that account, presumably until President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated.
Twitter’s decision has prompted criticism from world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called Trump’s ban “problematic,” and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said, “I don’t like anybody being censored or taking away from the right to post a message on Twitter or Face(book). I don’t agree with that, I don’t accept that.”
Twitter has since permanently deleted the accounts of Trump loyalists attorney Sidney Powell and former national security advisor Michael Flynn. It has also purged its platform of thousands upon thousands of conservative accounts, particularly those Twitter believes to be sharing QAnon content. A Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Twitter is suspending accounts “in line with our policy on Coordinated Harmful Activity.”
Not to be topped, Facebook has also been cracking down on conservative accounts and has launched a campaign against all “stop the steal” content ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
Conservatives frustrated with Twitter’s and Facebook’s politically motivated censorship have also been voluntarily leaving the platforms in droves.
According to Biz Pac Review, “So many Trump supporters showed up at the doorsteps of the non-establishment social media platforms Gab and Parler late Friday, in fact, that the platforms reportedly experienced outages.”
Of course, since then, Parler has also been shut down by the Big Tech Left, prompting an anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon and leading approximately 600,000 users to join Gab, an alternative social-media network, on Sunday. MeWe, a similar service, said it added 400,000 new users since Saturday.
