Twitter just suspended a Media Matters staffer for "spam" and "manipulation" & then unsuspended him

[highplainsdem]

The person suspended was Andrew Lawrence, MMFA's Director of Rapid Response.

6-tweet thread from MMFA's Kat Abu about this:

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Link to tweet

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More on this, from Andrew Lawrence:

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Btw, although he hasn't said yet what the specific cause of his being suspended was -- if he was told -- he'd posted this a few hours before he was suspended:

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And after mocking Musk, he'd also criticized Republicans and Fox News:

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[David__77]

1. Twitter is holocaust denial central.

…

[4Q2u2]

2. Maddening and Sad all at once

My dear departed father was a WWII Vet Infantry type. He saw the camps and lived in hell for years to fight and win over that Nazi crap. Seeing those Nazi symbols everywhere would have enraged him, and the Holocaust Denial would have given him an aneurism.

[Loki Liesmith]

3. Probably automated

If he was mass reported in a small time window he was probably algorithmically banned.

[highplainsdem]

4. RWers are planning to do mass reporting. They had a list of 5,000 Twitter accounts they want banned.

[yardwork]

5. Yesterday, I deleted my Twitter account.

The recent suspensions of journalists and thought leaders was the last straw for me.

For more than ten years, many businesses encouraged their employees to tweet outreach and information. I think it's very unlikely that any reputable business will continue asking their employees to use Twitter as a platform to amplify public relations.

It looks like Elon Musk wants to compete with 4chan. He'll probably make money off porn and conspiracy chatter, but that's not a platform I want to have anything to do with. I'm really sad about Twitter's demise.

[TheBeam19]

6. "the only way to fight back is to get me to 100k followers"

“the only way to fight back is to get me to 100k followers”

🙄

This is all social media is about these days. Someone is out to get me! Follow, like, and share!

[StormKing]

7. The FTC needs to step in n/t

[Cha]

8. Mahalo for these tweets, hpd..

this pisses me off.

So is Andrew back on twitter now?

[Evolve Dammit]

9. Musk, Trump are the new Axis of Evil. Throw in Fox and it's a trifecta

[gldstwmn]

10. My Twitter feed is full of RWNJ's and I don't even follow them.

And the people that I do follow, some of them don't show up on my feed. I'm sure it has everything to do with no one being there to steer the ship. I mean we certainly can't expect Elon to do it since he's preoccupied with his guns, Diet Coke and Buddhist amulet. It looks as though he lives like a teenage boy.

[highplainsdem]

11. I've seen a lot of complaints about that sort of thing. And I believe Musk's Twitter is boosting RW

accounts to give them more visibility.

If I do a search for Musk's name on Twitter - I'm not logged in, have history erased, so there's no filter - I get almost nothing but RW praise for Musk, see very little criticism.

If I do a search for Trump, I still see a lot more RW stuff than usual, though there are more of the liberal Twitter users whose tweets I like, so I think Musk is suppressing criticism of himself more than criticism of Trump.

I noticed a real shift in what I was seeing searching Twitter during and just after a Biden speech last month, though at the time Musk was claiming no changes had been made to Twitter.

And people who log in to Twitter and follow mostly liberals didn't see the dramatic change I saw.