A conservative news host’s account tracking violence against Trump supporters was deplatformed.
One America News Network host Jack Posobiec’s Twitter account “@MAGAphobia” was taken down from Twitter May 6. Posobiec said he started this account to “track violence against Trump supporters all in one place.” He tweeted, “Today Twitter banned it.”
Posobiec defined “MAGAphobia” as either a “irrational, unfounded fear of Donald Trump or his supporters” such as conspiracy theories that they are Russian agents or white supremacists.
BigLeaguePolitics claimed in its coverage that Anti-Trump violence “appears to be on the rise around the country.” The site listed a few prominent figures such as “Brandon Straka, Michael Knowles, and Owen Shroyer” who were all reportedly attacked in a single day.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has become a household name among conservatives concerned about the accelerating trend of deplatforming and censoring of conservatives. He appeared on an episode the Joe Rogan Podcast where he and the head of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” Vijaya Gadde were questioned about incidents. This included their refusal to ban a music producer who tweeted death threats against the Covington teens.
When free speech YouTuber Tim Pool pressed them on this issue, Gadde responded by saying:
“We don’t usually automatically suspend accounts with one violation….it's a big thing to kick someone off the platform, I wanna make sure that when someone violates our rules they understand what happened and are given an opportunity to get back on the platform and change their behavior.”
It appears Posobiec’s MAGAphobia account was given no such warning or opportunity.
More recently at a TED conference in Vancouver, Dorsey announced that machines are being used to deem what is or isn’t considered hate speech. “Around 38 percent of abusive tweets are now identified by machine learning. That was from 0 percent just a year ago, which meant that everyone who received abuse had to report it.”
Ironically, even U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitted that algorithms can be biased based upon how their creators who create them. At an MLK Now event she warned “if you don't fix the bias, then you're just automating the bias.”
