Twitter didn’t have much to say about the original “satirical” tweets from Sarah Jeong, but they acted quickly when a prominent conservative launched her own satire. Candace Owens, a prominent activist with conservative grassroots group Turning Point USA, got a prompt 12-hour suspension from Twitter after a string of tweets demeaning black and Jewish people. However, critics immediately charged the social-media platform’s executives with a double standard, pointing out that Owens had only replaced “white” with “black” and “Jewish” from Jeong’s years-long Twitter rants:

On Saturday, Owens called attention to racially charged tweets Jeong sent in years past for which she has come under fire in recent days. Owens, who is black, tweeted out the text of one of those tweets, swapping out the word “white” for “black.”

“Black people are only fit to live underground like groveling goblins. They have stopped breeding and will all go extinct soon. I enjoy being cruel to old black women,” she tweeted.

“No matter which way you slice it, [Jeong] is a racist. It is ABHORRENT that the failing [New York Times] has decided to stand by her,” Owens added in a follow-up tweet. “Hoping for the extermination of ANY race, is indefensible behavior.”

Owens also appeared to do a similar swap, replacing “white” with “Jewish.” However, that tweet appears to have been deleted, though users shared screenshots of the tweet.

Twitter admitted their error yesterday:

BLOWN AWAY by the amount of patriots that just came to my side to make this happen.
I will be periscoping LIVE about this entire debacle, in 30 mins.
I am blessed to know you all. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/r91vwRoVuA

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) August 5, 2018

That got the attention of Fox & Friends this morning, naturally:

Twitter apologizes after suspending Candace Owens’ account pic.twitter.com/6lQLGvjrGZ

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) August 6, 2018

It’s almost impossible to believe that Twitter didn’t know what Owens was doing with those tweets. They had already come under fire for biased enforcement of their rules even before the Sarah Jeong tweets came to light. Owens went out of her way to make her satire obvious, practically a dare to Twitter to enforce those rules on her while giving Jeong a pass. They fell into the trap, and only acknowledged it when Owens’ prominence forced them to do so.

I had wondered when someone would create a satirical Twitter account to skewer Jeong, and what Twitter’s reaction would be. Actually, I wondered less about the latter than the former, assuming all along that Twitter would not look kindly on this kind of sauce-for-the-gander strategy if it came from out of nowhere. What makes this all the more amusing is that their monitors didn’t bat an eyelash even when it came from a prominent woman of color with more than 600,000 followers. As faceplants go, that’s pretty epic.

It once again demonstrates the rabbit hole into which Twitter is rapidly descending. Their policies have become more and more subjective and their interventions more and more arbitrary, driven by the mobs rather than any rational application of “conversational health.” Sarah Jeong and Candace Owens aren’t the biggest problem on social media — it’s the pitchfork-and-torch brigades that Twitter is enabling and empowering. Twitter is enabling the Robespierres when they should be providing their customers with the tools to render them powerless. And it will end up being their ruin.

Note: With Allahpundit on vacation, I’m returning to active Twitter status this week.