As Twitter continues the selective policing of conduct on its website, it has made an enemy out of David Simon. The Wire and Deuce creator recently tore into Twitter in a statement after the platform suspended himself this week for wishing venereal rashes and boils onto a pair of Twitter users, one of them a Trump supporter he was arguing with.
Simon remains blocked because, as he says, he is “indifferent to removing the tweets they insist are violative of their rules.” In one of the tweets, which seems to have been deleted, Simon told a M.A.G.A. supporter that they should “should die of a slow moving veneral [sic] rash that settles in your lying throat,” according to EW, and in another, which is still up, he told another Twitter user to “die of boils.” Simon railed against the whole situation in a post on his website, which he began with a tribute to his late friend Anthony Bourdain, and said that he was unable to post the tribute onto Twitter because he found hed been suspended.
Suffice to say that while you can arrive on Twitter and disseminate the untethered and anti-human opinion that mothers who have their children kidnapped and held incommunicado from them at the American border are criminals — and both mother and child deserve that fate — or that 14-year-old boys who survive the Holocaust are guilty of betraying fellow Jews when there is no evidence of such, you CANNOT wish that these people should go away and die of a fulminant venereal rash. Slander is cool, brutality is acceptable. But the hyperbolic and comic hope that a just god might smite the slanderer or brutalizer with a deadly skin disorder is somehow beyond the pale. Die of boils, @jack.
He concluded by accusing Twitter of the same selective, nonsensical policing it has been accused of from many others who have faced the wrath of suspension, saying that the website is contributing to the very same conduct it says it is working to eliminate. “As far as Im concerned,” Simon wrote, “your standards in this instance are exactly indicative of why social media—and Twitter specifically—is complicit in transforming our national agora into a haven for lies, disinformation and the politics of totalitarian extremity. The real profanity and disease on the internet is untouched, while you police decorum.”
A Twitter spokesperson provided a statement to Vulture, in which they reiterated, “We cannot comment on specific accounts for privacy and security reasons, but its against the Twitter Rules to engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone elses voice.”
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