Earlier this weekend notorious right-winger blogger and professional troll Chuck C. Johnson was banned from Twitter after he began soliciting donations toward the goal of “taking out” civil rights activist DeRay McKesson, who quit his job as a school administrator in Minnesota to join and cover the protests following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri.
Here’s a quick recap of what’s going on with Twitter’s expulsion of Chuck Johnson.
For at least the fourth time in his sad, shameful, misogynist, racist career, Twitter has suspended the rightwing blogger Chuck Johnson.
This expulsion came after Johnson solicited donations toward the goal of “taking out” civil rights activist DeRay McKesson. McKesson, who quit his job as a school administrator in Minnesota to join and cover the protests following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, says he took the tweet “as a serious threat” and thus a violation of Twitter’s policies against threatening acts of violence. Johnson claims it was not a death threat but rather a call to support “investigative journalism” into McKesson’s past, presumably to discredit him.
Moreover, Johnson is outraged over the suspension, tweeting under a new account @citizentrolling– which a few minutes prior to my writing this sentence has now also been suspended — that Twitter is guilty of “censorship” and writing that the company’s enforcement of its policies exhibits a clear political bias against rightwingers like himself.
“Twitter doesn’t seem to have a problem with people using their service to coordinate riots,” Johnson wrote. “But they do have a problem with the kind of journalism I do.”
I’m struggling to know where to begin in describing the lunacy of Johnson’s argument. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t engage at all with Johnson who has failed to build a career through producing quality journalism or analysis and instead — in what must be an overwhelmingly sad discovery — has found that the only thing anyone will pay him for anymore is to spew hatred at the most vulnerable members of society, in particular rape victims. But his complaints raise some important misconceptions about Twitter, free speech, and who controls what can or can’t be said in the new digital content paradigm.
Now it appears that Johnson is threatening legal action against Twitter for loss of income that would otherwise be generated by his hateful tweets. Johnson emailed me the letter his attorneys sent to Twitter demanding the reinstatement of his accounts, attached in full below. What makes it so absurd is the notion that Twitter is somehow guilty of “censorship” or that the company owes him a living.
I felt this story was worth sharing because Chuck Johnson is perhaps the most famous example of the kind of tactics – namely trolling and/or intimidation – that so many on the right-wing are so fond of employing.
Not defending Chuck Johnson’s behavior here but perhaps he is simply taking a page from the progressives playbook. After all, if a baker has no right to refuse service on religious grounds, why should twitter be allowed to refuse service on ideological grounds? Or we could simply return to being a free country where no party is forced by government into business arrangements that they find objectionable.
Not surprised 7:04 pm attempts to confuse the Twitter issue and distract from the topic with a lame Establishment Clause example expressly aimed to discredit and blame progressives for something. FAIL!! What’s new? Nothing. Put out bullshit in the form of a question, same old, same trolled. Follow with a conclusion based on the initial BS and pretend to have made some intellectual or valid point. Pathetic.
Anybody reading the OP can see there is nothing to do with religion in the CJ vs Twitter circus. CJ (from what I know of twitter) voluntarily agreed to the terms of twitter’s contract in digitally signing up for the privilege of using twitter’s service and establishing an account with twitter. The government didn’t force Chuckie into any agreement with twitter.
Reading Chuck’s complaints, he is not the only one whose accounts were interrupted or temporarily frozen as this happened repeatedly to several black leaders/organizers in Ferguson and elsewhere during 1st amendment protected assemblies. Also police were monitoring social media channels to anticipate rally directions and learn of upcoming plans from key people they were aware of as event organizers. I didn’t see those two points mentioned in the OP or the links.
Denis Navratil: “why should twitter be allowed to refuse service on ideological grounds?”
Incitement to murder [or soliciting conspirators to commit murder] is not only a violation of Terms of Service, but also a felony in the offline world, in the objective law of the land, all 50 states, no matter one’s ideology. For Twitter NOT to refuse service on those grounds would put it at reasonable risk of legal liability itself. For you not to understand the difference between murder and a matter of ideology brings into question your own fundamental understanding of right and wrong, i.e. legal sanity.