A Purge's Progress

"If you are reading this I'm already dead..." 

Nick Monroe on being banned from Twitter for the Orwellian offense of "ban evasion":

You’re reading this because I’m gone now. Twitter permanently banned me for a “ban evasion” lasting three-and-a-half years.

 They say my account – which amassed almost 50,000 followers and has appeared on numerous news websites – is a “ban evader”. This means I had an old account which was banned, so they banned my new account, too.

Twitter: "If you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts."

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.

Banning people from the platform is inconsistent with allowing fictional personas in the first place. Whatever the case, Twitter doesn't believe in redemption.
Monroe is apologetic about the old account

Being banned on Twitter is a lot like participating in both the court of public opinion and a funeral at the same time. Both my followers and detractors are judging my body of work and all my actions in the wake of the ban. I wasn’t always the person I am today, but who I am was best described in my interview with Michael Malice.
Roughly five years ago, I was ‘PressFartToContinue’ (PFTC).

It's all somber tones and puerile names in the Current Year. Future man won't know what to make of it.

I made a YouTube account by that name when I was 17-years-old. It was meant to be a fan channel of ‘PressHeartToContinue’.

I had no idea what I was doing, or how my actions would come to impact me years later. I, like just about everyone else in the world, have grown since I was 17. And I know who I am today. I’m the independent Twitter journalist who spoke out against online censorship before I too was banned.

And that last part is what this is really all about. Twitter is not scandalized by the thought of enemy of humanity PressFartToContinue evading justice. Ironically, it's the good behavior of Monroe's later account, and its effectiveness as a critique that inspires this action. The ruse is laughable.

Monroe was actually quite disciplined and broke no pc rules--the very model of how to get past the censors, if they were even faking an unbiased stance.

A little too on that adorable nose.
Twitter earlier banned an AOC parody account for being "misleading" despite the author including the word "parody" in the title and bio. The author was then perma-suspended for having a personal account as well, which isn't actually forbidden.

"No, really, Mr. Hanson, my intention was just to bring shame upon her and her family..."
Meanwhile Dateline NBC still hasn't come around for Gawker's Josh Bernstein for stalking a 14 year-old girl. One thing I didn't know about the Soph saga is the police were actually called in after his hit-piece:

According to the local Kron4 new station, they published a piece on May 17th, 2019 indicating that police are investigating Soph based on complaints made by those at her school, who have begun shunning the teenager and claiming that what she stated in her “Be Not Afraid” video was “disgusting”. The video was taken down by YouTube shortly after the Buzzfeed article was published...

The Daily Beast punches up at a barely-employed sports blogger:

On May 22, a Donald Trump superfan and occasional sports blogger from the Bronx named Shawn Brooks posted a video clip of Nancy Pelosi on his personal Facebook page. The clip showed Pelosi at her most excitable, stammering during a press conference as she voiced frustration over an abortive infrastructure meeting with the president. Brooks’ commentary on the video was succinct: “Is Pelosi drunk?” 

Thirteen minutes later, a Facebook official told The Daily Beast, Brooks posted a very different Pelosi video to a Facebook page called Politics WatchDog—one of a series of hyperpartisan news operations Brooks runs (with help, he claims). This clip had been altered to slow Pelosi down without lowering the pitch of her voice. The effect was to make it sound as though the Speaker of the House was slurring her words drunkenly while criticizing Donald Trump. 

Fifteen minutes after that, the same doctored video appeared on a second Facebook page Brooks manages, AllNews 24/7. This clip was identical to the Politics WatchDog video on every way, except that it didn’t carry the Politics WatchDog branding that was superimposed over the earlier video. Whoever posted it had access to the director’s cut. On both pages the clip was accompanied by the exact same dispassionate, newsy prose: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Trump walking out infrastructure meeting: ‘It was very, very, very strange.’”

At the same time, doctoring that video was wrong. I'll chalk it up to the fact Brooks is a black guy. His defenders sure seem fixated on that.

Again this is all about trying to prevent a Trump victory in 2020. But it's also a global trend. Angela Merkel's chosen successor has proposed censoring dissidents ahead of elections:

Merkel's successor sparks freedom of speech uproarPicture: Die WeltSofia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's favoured successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer sparked outrage on social media on Tuesday with an apparent call for limits to free speech around elections, AFP reported. 

The CDU chief's comment came after her party and its centre-left coalition partner SPD suffered their worst scores in Sunday's European election -- a result partly blamed on the fact that some 70 YouTube stars had urged Germans not to vote for either party.

Addressing the issue on Monday night, Kramp-Karrenbauer said if 70 newspaper editors had called to boycott parties ahead of an election, that would be classed "clearly as propaganda". 

"The question is... what are rules from the analogue realm and which rules should apply to the digital realm?

"I'll tackle this discussion quite aggressively," said Kramp-Karrenbauer, or AKK as she is dubbed in Germany.

The pace quickens.