Rachel Levine an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and is male-to-female transgender; Twitter apparently takes the view that referring to Levine as a man—whether or not within satire or ideological criticism—violates its rules “against hateful conduct,” which ban “promot[ing]Threatening violence[ing]Or harass[ing]Other people on the basis” of, among others, their gender identity. (Twitter’s policyIt states, “This includes the targeted misgendering and deadnaming transgender people.”
It is for 12 hours. However, the ban applies only to tweets that are deleting. The CEO at Babylon Bee is refusing.
It’s not like we are deleting any thing. Hate speech is not truth. If telling the truth costs us our Twitter account, so be it.
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) March 20, 2022
You can find more information at Newsweek (Gerrard Kaionga) or the New York Post(Ariel Zilber), as well as other outlets.
Twitter is a privately owned company, and therefore not bound by the First Amendment. Although it is open to question whether Twitter should or could be limited by federal and state statutes, there are no current federal laws that restrict Twitter’s ability to exercise its discretion. These social media platforms are “the modern open square”, as the Supreme Court called them. I feel it would be worthwhile to monitor the constraints they place on different views.