A couple of week’s ago, Twitter permanently suspended the account of controversial alt-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos. The reasons why have been hotly debated, but what isn’t deniable is that Milo was in the middle of a feud with Ghostbusters co-star Leslie Jones.
Jones claimed she was leaving the social media network forever due to the alleged harassment she was receiving.
Well, conservative writer Kassy Dillon decided to try a little experiment. You see, while Milo is alleged to have organized a harassment campaign against Jones, it’s not like she was some blossom of innocence or anything. Dillon repeated one of Jones’ tweets. Just to see if standards would be applied equally.
Guess what happened. Go ahead. Guess.
Kassy Dillon, a contributor to Campus Reform and Heat Street and founder of Lone Conservative, was suspended temporarily from Twitter following Tweets made about Leslie Jones.
“The only reason why I tweeted copies of what Leslie said is to show bias,” Dillon told Heat Street. “If this famous actress actress does it, it’s okay, but if I do the same thing as a conservative writer, Twitter punishes me for it.”
Dillon believes that the suspension was in part because she has been campaigning hard to reinstate Milo Yiannopoulos to Twitter and pushing the #FreeMilo hashtag.
What is strange about the suspension is who was not suspended by Twitter: People who’ve tweeted death threats and the like aimed at Dillon.
The tweet by Jones that Dillon repeated:
@DolphinToucher and you and your friends are bigots.If you don’t like me why the fuck do you watch let alone contact me. Kill yourself bigot
— Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) March 8, 2015
The only difference between Jones’ tweet and Dillon’s is who it’s directed at. That’s it.
Yet Jones received nothing from Twitter and Dillon did.
The death threats to Dillon didn’t seem to bother Twitter either.
Now, I get it that Twitter is a private business and they’re free to do what they want. It’s their playground, after all. Anyone calling for the government to get involved needs to sit down and shut up. That’s not what the problem is.
Where the problem lies is in how the rules aren’t applied evenly, and that’s all the reason many people should need to step away from Twitter. Frankly, if enough people did that, the problem would probably take care of itself.
Whether Kassy Dillon or Milo Yiannopoulos is ever back on Twitter is irrelevant. What should matter is whether they’re bounced while Leslie Jones gets a free pass.
Or will they just change the Terms of Service to say that liberal celebrities get a pass? We already know it, so they might as well just admit it.
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