Twitter shuts down influential alt-right accounts

The alt-right embraces white nationalism, and is said to have played a role in the US presidential campaign. It is characterized by its fierce opposition to political correctness.

US president-elect Donald Trump’s new chief strategist and Breitbart executive chairman, Stephen Bannon is accused of being a leading figure in the alt-right movement. The movement was prominent during the US presidential campaign, with Breitbart News, a website that has been deemed a voice for the alt-right.

Democratic presidential loser Hillary Clinton singled out the alt-right in August as the “racist” force behind Trump.

The suspended accounts include that of Richard Spencer, as well as his magazine Radix Journal, think tank National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers and various other Alt Right accounts.

Not only is Richard Spencer one of the key figures of the alt-right movement, he actually coined the term “alternative right,” shortened to alt-right.

“The age of digital platform censorship is upon us!” Spencer said in reaction to the ban. “This just shows how dangerous the left-wing/media complex sees our ideas.”

Spencer was nevertheless surprised by the move, because he says he has never once resorted to harassment: “I think Twitter, Facebook and others are deeply triggered by this election and that social media helped elect Trump.”

“It is corporate Stalinism; there is a great purge going on … I am alive physically but digitally speaking there has been execution squads across the alt-right,” Spencer said.

“The Trump phenomenon expresses a fundamental truth,” Spencer told Rolling Stone earlier in an interview. “It’s an unspoken truth, and that is that the Republican Party has won elections on the basis of implicit nationalism and not on the basis of the Constitution, free-market economics, vague Christian values and so on. Even a leftist would agree with that statement. Like, Trump has shown the hand of the GOP. The GOP is a white person’s populist party.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center – a non-profit organization that tracks what it views as “hate groups” – asked Twitter to remove over 100 accounts of “white supremacists”.

The struggling San Francisco-based media platform Twitter told the news agency AFP that its rules prohibit “violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct”.

It says already prohibits “hate speech based on race, gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation” but did little to stem thousands of assassination threats from leftists against the new US president.

On Tuesday the financially ailing Twitter rolled out measures against “trolls” including an expanded “mute” feature to block accounts sending messages they don’t like.

“The amount of abuse, bullying, and harassment we’ve seen across the internet has risen sharply over the past few years,” Twitter announced.

This also comes after Twitter banned two other popular figures in the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos from Breitbart as well as certified MIT election influencer Ricky Vaughn.

Breitbart has recorded a series of strange deaths of their pivotal news figures. Mike Flynn, Big Government Editor for Breitbart News, published a final article on the day he died unexpectedly, “Clinton Cash: Bill, Hillary Created Their Own Chinese Foundation in 2014” on June 23, 2016.

J. Christian Adams of PJ Media, wrote a tribute to Flynn: “[He] was a brilliant and knowledgeable fellow who had a knack for channelling the zeal of the rising new media into an effective and credible force.

“Too many young and effective voices are dying early. Just a few years ago, Mike, Andrew Breitbart and Chip Gerdes could be a swirl of activity on email and the phone, “weaponizing” the next big wave. That they are all gone is hard to contemplate.”

Flynn had been handpicked by Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart, who also died in mysterious circumstances.

On March 1, 2012, conservative media firebrand Andrew Breitbart collapsed on a street near his home in Brentwood, CA. Breitbart was only 43 years old. The Coroners Office released its final autopsy report on Breitbart — that he had died from “heart failure”.

Mere days after the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office issued its final autopsy report on the sudden death of bane-of-the-Left Andrew Breitbart, news came that a forensic criminologist at the LA County Coroner, Michael Cormier, had suddenly died from suspected arsenic poisoning.

Cormier had been working on the Breitbart case.