Baby New Year
Twitter rang in the New Year by banning Marjorie Taylor Greene
Well, banning one of her accounts, anyway.
It took a little longer than we expected, but she finally pulled it off: At 1:46 p.m. ET on New Year's Day, House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Mordor) flagrantly violated Twitter’s content policies via her personal account for a 5th time, prompting the social media company to permanently ban @mtgreenee from the platform. We congratulate her on earning the coveted far-right conservative merit badge in self-righteous martyrdom, and wish her all the best on the bottom-rung social media venue, GETTR, where she posted (gettred? getted? got?), “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.” She added that she’ll soon “show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”
Shine on, Marjorie, you brilliant, blazing dumpster fire. Shine on.
UPDATE: Earlier this morning, Rep. Greene announced that Facebook has also suspended her account for 24 hours following similarly unhinged posts to her Twitter screeds. “This is beyond censorship of speech,” Rep. Greene wrote on one of her remaining social media platforms.
It is not, in fact, beyond censorship of speech.
Official government account remains intact — Unfortunately, Rep. Greene has not one, but two official Twitter accounts to her name: The aforementioned personal one (RIP) and her official House Representative page, which is still relatively active. Although Greene does not spout from her professional handle nearly as much as her now-banned one, such recent highlights include claiming jailed January 6 insurrectionists are being treated worse than Guantanamo Bay detainees and advocating for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It’s somewhat unlikely we’ll see the same kinds of COVID-19 conspiracies and misinformation given the “professional” nature and expectations of Greene’s House Representative account, but as others have shown us, it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
New Year’s Resolution: Deplatform — Although online deplatforming studies have shown mixed results, the strategy undeniably helps silence some of these movements’ most influential, inflammatory, and dangerous individuals. While that may not fully stifle the ideologies themselves, it often can discourage the people currently profiting the most from them.
All that said, as far as we’re concerned, banishing figures like Greene to banal online purgatory of places like GETTR is totally fine with us, and a pretty great start to 2022. Let’s keep this momentum going, everyone.
