Twitter temporarily boots Marjorie Taylor Greene

AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack

The trend of people being dropped from social media platforms for peddling “misinformation” isn’t slowing down. One of the more high-profile targets to earn the wrath of Twitter is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Monday, two of her tweets were hit with the misinformation tag and her account was set to “read-only mode” for twelve hours. And once again, the topic under discussion at the time was the COVID-19 vaccine. Greene is opposed to our military making vaccinations mandatory for service members. She has also been an outspoken advocate of fighting obesity and promoting better health so that people who do catch the virus will have less severe outcomes. These ideas are now apparently classified as dangerous misinformation. (NY Post)

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Twitter suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday for violating its policy against posting “misleading information” related to the coronavirus pandemic.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to The Post that Greene’s personal account would be in “read-only mode” for 12 hours. According to the social media giant’s COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policy unveiled in March, 12-hour suspensions are doled out for second and third violations. A fourth violation results in a week’s suspension, while a fifth strike would lead to a ban.

Greene’s suspension was first reported by the New York Times.

Here are the offending tweets that were flagged.

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I’m sure this is just a total coincidence (/sarc), but does anyone recall Joe Biden saying that social media outlets were “killing people” and Jen Psaki admitting that the White House was flagging certain social media posts put out by people who shouldn’t be on social media?

Admittedly, I’m pretty sure that Marjorie Taylor Greene has enough progressives watching her like a hawk at this point that Twitter wouldn’t need explicit marching orders from the White House to take this sort of action. But it’s still a disturbing situation.

First of all, private companies like Twitter can’t technically cancel anyone’s free speech rights or violate the First Amendment. But when the White House begins “flagging” social media posts and exerting pressure on those companies to silence users, that sounds very much like a case of censorship.

Then there’s the issue of how this content winds up being flagged as misinformation. If you tweet that half of the people who get the vaccine die, then that’s definitely misinformation because there is no data to back up the claim and tons of data to show that only a comparatively small number of all recipients of the vaccine have severe reactions requiring hospitalization or leading to death. But there have been many questions raised about all of the vaccines, including the mRNA technology used by Pfizer and Moderna. We’ve heard from doctors who admit they still won’t know everything we need to know until more testing is done and more time goes by.

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With that in mind, is it truly “misinformation” to describe the vaccines as “controversial?” The figure she gave for “vax-related deaths” is on the dodgy side, because so many of the side effects haven’t conclusively been linked directly to the vaccine, but, again, it’s a subject of debate. As to whether or not the vaccine should be mandatory for the military, that’s nothing more than an opinion.

Saying that a vaccine shouldn’t be mandatory before receiving full FDA approval is something that spokespeople for the FDA have said themselves. And suggesting that people lose weight and get healthy to help them better fight the virus if they contract it is just common sense. Your own doctor will tell you the same thing if you ask.

That’s the main reason I wanted to bring this story up. Social media giants, with the help of the mainstream press and, now, the White House, are playing a game here. They’re saying that they want to eliminate “misinformation” on social media, but they get to pick and choose what does or doesn’t qualify as misinformation. And much of it is simply opinion. This is happening in many topics beyond just COVID. And if we don’t figure out a way to effectively combat this trend soon, the left will have figured out a way to effectively censor all conservative thoughts and opinions on the largest speech platforms on the planet.

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Remember. If you have a “controversial” opinion on any of these subjects and someone accuses you of engaging in “hate speech,” you have an easy answer at hand. “It’s not hate speech. It’s just speech that you hate.”

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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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