Twitter is championed as the world wide haven of free speech for all. They present themselves as a platform that allows you to speak your opinion, and mostly they are, unless you post anything that remotely goes against a certain narrative or that might offend certain people. 

Let’s take the following story as an example:

Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, the founder of Canada’s leading feminist website, was banned from Twitter for tweets in which she claimed that men cannot become women, and that there is no difference between men and transgender women. After Twitter lifted her ban, she proceeded to double down on her position, and criticized Twitter saying:

Her account has previously been suspended multiples times for tweets critical of the LGBT community, transgender activists, and Twitter rules regarding hateful conduct.

Twitter has recently changed it’s terms of service to be more protective of, and sometimes even pandering to the transgender community. Tweets that contain “misgendering” or “deadnaming” are now against the terms of service, and users can be reported and even banned, even though such tweets are often done on accident and are harmless.

Why it’s bad and must stop:

Twitter has already applied existing rules to ban people who express opinions that oppose transgender ideology, and these new guidelines will only make it worse. Twitter presents themselves as a free speech platform. Being a free speech platform means you must allow people to express their opinions, even if they might offend someone else. If all opinions that may offend people were banned, then there really wouldn’t be many opinions left, because people could then claim to be offended by anything.

Twitter going down the path of censoring opinions is dangerous and un-American, and should be opposed. Letting people share their opinions is important, because it allows us to discuss differing ideals and understand different viewpoints, which is essential to American life and politics.

This is not the first instance of censorship, with many people and other well known users being banned for expressing various opinions. Some notable figures suspended and/or banned in the past few years include Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, Jesse Kelly, James Allsup, Paul Nehlen, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and other people with Info Wars ties, Elizabeth Johnston, Roger Stone, Tommy Robinson, Owen Benjamin, Mike Enoch, Gavin McInnes and Proud Boys, James Woods, Talbert W. Swan II, 70 million accounts dubbed “fake” or “malicious,” and many more. Many of the aforementioned bans happened just this year, and were considered to be very controversial as Twitter cited reasons such as offensive and hateful content for the bans. Sometimes they failed to give a reason for the bans at all.

Many people are outraged over Twitter’s actions. Forty-nine percent of people say that Twitter should be regulated, according to a Harvard/Harris Poll. 

Many people are becoming more vocal about this issue. In fact, a growing number of conservatives are even calling for a Twitter boycott, because of the the number of suspension and bans. Inspired by past Twitter boycotts, many conservatives and notable figures are stopping their use of Twitter, in attempts to sway them to stop censoring of. The boycott, while small now, is rapidly growing. I don’t know if it will be successful, or whether it’s the right way to approach the issue, but I do think it’s great that people are finally taking some sort of action.

Twitter presents itself as a free speech platform, but has been caught censoring people’s opinions. Allowing free speech is important if Twitter is going to present itself as a free speech platform, so let’s hold them to that standard from here on out. 

Is Twitter going to far in this specific case with Meghan Murphy?